
Pause, We Can Go Back - Vigier
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/02/09/revenge-analog-pause-we-can-go-back/
======
jasode
I'm one of the people that this article (and book) romanticizing The Analog
should appeal to but my overall experience with the digital revolution has
been a net positive. This applies to both digital photography and digital
music.

I had a collection of vinyl records & cassettes growing up but I've gotten
more enjoyment and revelations from listening to Foobar software accessing
thousands of flac/mp3 files instantly on demand. I can jump from pop to
classical to jazz without the tediousness of manipulating analog media.
Digital has allowed me to _appreciate music even more_.

The vast majority of articles of analog-vs-digital seem to favor analog and it
downplays how digital can engage people in ways that analog can't replicate.

As an example, the first time I heard the Star Wars soundtrack was on a reel-
to-reel tape machine.[1] Analog nostalgia. However, with digital technology, a
skilled person with a computer workstation can use virtual instruments to
recreate the orchestral arrangement one instrument at a time.[2] The listener
can then hear the gradual build up of how all the various parts interact and
_appreciate the music even more_ than the old analog tape. That demonstration
is not economically possible with analog. Sure, one could make a 24-track
analog tape of isolated parts but typical listeners will not have the money to
own a 24-track player at home. Also, David Das in the video is experimenting
with various combinations of articulations, tempo, and volume and that
combinatorial explosion exceeds the capacity of 24 tracks.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=star+wars+soundtrack+reel+re...](https://www.google.com/search?q=star+wars+soundtrack+reel+reel+4+track&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

[2] deep link showing adding an instrument and then a playback payoff:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYfbm3qHRLI&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYfbm3qHRLI&feature=youtu.be&t=23m51s)

~~~
criddell
> I can jump from pop to classical to jazz without the tediousness of
> manipulating analog media.

I think you are ignoring the fact that for some people, the manipulation of
the analog media is part of the joy. Whenever something new overtakes
something old, that's going to happen. I'm excited about self-driving cars
relieving me from having to drive while other people are still buying manual
transmission cars because they love the direct manipulation of the machine.
When I want a cup of tea, I dump hot water over a tea bag while other people
go through an elaborate ritual.

I don't have a record player, but I do have fond memories of sitting in my
room with headphones on while a record played, looking at the large format
cover art and studying the sleeve. I'm not a collector of anything, but I
think I understand the joy of artifacts.

One thing I am somewhat surprised is that the streaming music services haven't
borrowed the idea of filters from Instagram to apply to music. Would anybody
be interested in simulating playback through a tube amp? Through a suitcase
record player? Through a high quality turntable? Or a low quality turntable
that can't quite turn at 33-1/3 RPMs?

~~~
jasode
_> I think you are ignoring the fact that for some people, the manipulation of
the analog media is part of the joy._

No, I'm not ignoring that aspect and I understand that physical touch of media
can add enjoyment for some people.

What I disagree with is the constant biased narrative from writers that
_emphasizes_ analog media's attributes. That perspective presents a one-sided
view favoring analog such as:

1) physical media you can touch is better than digital bits you can't touch

2) ownership is better than subscription (Spotify streaming)

3) listening in 20-minute side of 1 album is better than instantly jumping
around a large music library

... ergo, analog is overall better than digital consumption. (As I stated
before, I disagree as a person who straddles both the vinyl and digital eras.
I've had extensive experience with both formats and the digital experience is
better in my case. Many people besides me have come to this same conclusion.)

Yes, holding in your hand a vinyl album's cover art and reading its lyrics can
add joy to music but there's also the _opposite_ view that seems uncool to
write about: there's also joy in _not handling_ physical media. It's this
second perspective I'm emphasizing and it doesn't take away from anyone who
prefers their vinyl records.

~~~
anigbrowl
You're overlooking the fact that we've already been here before and
experienced the rush to digital as a world of perfect reproducibility and
consistency without all the inconveniences of analog.

Digital is better if your priority is the things that are more easy with
digital. If you ask me to mix your movie soundtrack, I'll head straight for
the digital desk hooked up to the Pro Tools rig and it's be plugins for
breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you invite me to jam for musical pleasure,
I'll switch on the 303 that I have wired into a shitty desk that I bought
_because_ it sounds so shitty and I enjoy the way it crunches a hot signal.

Multitracking, refining, polishing, can be enjoyable and deliver a sense of
accomplishment when you deliver the end product, but it's work. The music I
make and listen to for pleasure is typically done with cheaper, crappier gear,
pushed beyond its design parameters, and recorded in one pass. I suppose you
could cal it a techno-punk aesthetic; when you have sequencers and editing
tools at your fingertips, the personal aspects are best expressed (for me)
through performance rather than through perfection.

~~~
ThomPete
not sure these things are excluding each other.

~~~
anigbrowl
Of course not, but for years there's been a 'digital can do anything analog
can do so why even use analog' from the digital side of music engineering. To
which I answer, because I don't _want_ to have perfect consistency and
predictability in every context. There are contexts in which I _want_
imprecision, nonlinearity, and surprise so that I can _select_ rather than
_design_.

I'm not sure how to articulate this, but it's a general problem in our
technology culture. To me this is not that different from not wanting to write
code all the time. You know what I hate about writing code? When I'm working
with unfamiliar languages/frameworks/libraries I don't know what all the
available options are, whereas when I'm working with more visual tools I can
see all the options even if I don't understand what they do, and I can select
and experiment and, well, _play_ with the options until I find something
useful or interesting. I can't play when I'm writing code because my
experiments are just liable to result in syntax errors or suchlike.

Writing code appeals to people who like learning a bunch of things first and
then recombining them. I find this kind of learning slow and tedious and I
keep wonder why I'm doing all this syntax bullshit instead of letting the
computer handle it for me so I can focus on my domain-specific ideas.

Likewise when I talk with DSP programmers about how I like the
unpredictability and nonlinearities of analog signals, they say things like 'I
could add a random noise generator to the oscillator algorithm' or so (I'm
simplifying, but that's a design reality on many electronic musical
instruments). This is often a self-defeatinmg strategy, at least in the short
term - witness Roland corporation bending over backwards to do The! Most!
Accurate! Component! simulation! Ever! in a recent line of digital devices
featuring 'analog circuit behavior'. Meanwhile their smaller rival Korg has
completely crushed them in the very important entry and mid-level market
segments by simply producing what the market wanted - a wide variety of cheap
analog gear, mixing both classic and new designs, and labeling the boards and
publishing the schematics so people can mod them if they're handy with a
soldering iron.

------
vosper
> What if Picasso had had Snapchat? What if Hemingway had spent half the
> afternoon writing Yelp reviews of his favorite bars?

Is the author suggesting that great art and writing can no longer happen,
because of Snapchat and Yelp? Because I'd argue that we've never lived in a
time when it's been easier to create art, of all kinds, and there doesn't seem
to be any shortage of great literature being published, either.

I find this endless bemoaning of the unrealness of "digital" quite tiresome.

~~~
imgabe
Hemingway could have, if he wanted to, spent half the afternoon writing
reviews of his favorite bars. You don't need Yelp for that. Just like Picasso
could have spent his time taking pictures of food or whatever the author
imagines people do with Snapchat.

This all seems more like an excuse. "I could be Hemingway if only that
dastardly Yelp weren't distracting me all the time!". Yelp isn't the one to
blame here.

~~~
sanderjd
Also, both Picasso and Hemingway spent lots of time socializing, especially
with other artists. At the most distilled level, that's what people use all
this new-fangled technology for.

~~~
throwawaycopy
Did you read the article? The author addresses and counters this notion that
digital socializing brings us together.

See, you've put all of your spiritual and ethical eggs in to your technologic
worship so you are completely closed off to the notion that smartphones might
actually be really horrible. You're basically just defending your own thinly
veiled insecurities about how you give your own life meaning.

~~~
sanderjd
Woah, calm down - I was just expanding on the single comment I replied to.

I'm an old fogey who isn't young or cool enough to have all my eggs in that
basket. My eggs are far more in the sitting-around-reading-books-and-
newspapers and hiking-in-the-mountains baskets.

But I do think this hysteria is pretty overblown, as your comment
demonstrates.

------
rtpg
I love my omni-devices a lot, but there is an anti-social angle to it that I
wish I could get over.

Nobody knows what you're doing on your iPad. You could be reading your
e-mails, scrolling through twitter, or buying something on Amazon. But in a
more casual environment (living room, with friends), you lose opportunities
for spontaneous interactions.

There's also a difficulty in sharing. You can't give the funny pages to
someone. Hard to loan e-books sometimes.

I think some of this is solved by TV screens. Long term, I bet we'll be
"casting" our phones to screens a lot more often in social environments.

But sometimes the limitation of physical goods is nice. Legos are funner than
CAD software, most of the time.

~~~
mojuba
For this same reason modern cinematography often resorts to older tech or no
tech. Dialling someone's number on the mobile is not as dramatic as doing it
on older bulkier phones. Scrolling something on the iPad is not the same as
paging a real book. Then there's writing a real letter, not knowing someone's
whereabouts as opposed to just calling their mobile, etc. etc.

Tech _is_ social in its own way but it seems to be bringing these massive
anthropological changes. It will be interesting to see whether the come back
of physical tech like vinyl is serious or it's just some of kind of a protest
of the older generation.

~~~
rtpg
Tech has ruined many classic ways of storytelling in cinema

Nobody prints giant newspaper headlines anymore. Nobody holds a map upside-
down.

My bet is many more movies will be based in the 80s.

------
doctorpangloss
> Last year, in fact, the OECD reported that “students who use computers very
> frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”

There's no universe where having less information available to students
improves learning.

Wikipedia for everyone is revolutionary! I doubt an OECD test can capture
that.

The problem OLPC faced is that the iPod touch was a more compelling device for
children. Its bill of materials today is less than $100. And children use
touch devices religiously. OLPC had no hope of delivering a competitor to
iPhone on technological and business grounds. But the theory is probably
sound.

~~~
canadian_voter
_There 's no universe where having less information available to students
improves learning._

I think that's an oversimplification.

I highly recommend _The Shallows_ by Nicholas Carr. A quicker read is the
article that inspired the book: Is Google Making Us Stupid?[0]

He's not blindly or rapidly anti-tech. For example, he says: _" The Web has
been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the
stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes."_

But he does recognize that there are drawbacks to how we engage with digital
media: _" When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of
information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental
connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains
largely disengaged._"

[0] [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-
googl...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-
making-us-stupid/306868/)

~~~
aidenn0
I have read novels since before the internet. I'm more likely to interpret and
make connections about an article I discuss on HN than I am for any book I
read (which I consume like popcorn).

------
pessimizer
This is a good time to sell your records. The heavy marketing of kitsch to
millennials has driven the price up on anything redolent of "authenticity." I
got $3K for mine. Started by only mostly taking the ones I thought were nice,
but then noticed how much they were paying for the ones that were crap I paid
25 cents for at a Salvation Army. The rest of them followed shortly.

------
alkonaut
Just walked along the beach and saw an elderly couple sit on a bench, talking.
Neither of them held a smartphone. Perhaps they don't even own one. It struck
me that short of a revolution in this area, the number of times I'll do that
with my wife will be easily counted. Obviously I wasn't like this 10 years
ago. Conversation has become too slow and unrewarding for me to even engage
in. Hell, even my favorite tv sports or a good movie is too slow and has too
little instant reward to not use Twitter at the same time.

I think a holiday island that banned all mobile broadband could actually use
it as a selling point.

~~~
girvo
I just spent four weeks in Cuba, where the only Internet is (expensive, slow)
public wifi hotspots in extremely select places, and I had zero cell service
either as my carrier had no roaming agreement.

I got quite a bit of exploratory programming done, and read a lot of books
(and explored Cuba itself of course! Made half a dozen friends, amazingly
friendly people)

~~~
alkonaut
It has to be zero though, not "sparse" or "slow" as that just means I'll not
see Cuba but instead see the inside of that lobby with WiFi :) That's how bad
thus illness is.

Unfortunately I think before I get a change to go the island will be blanketed
in 4G (fortunately for them though... I think).

------
kozak
Just noticed yesterday that vinyl records started being sold in my local
supermarket, alongside a disappearing variety of CD/DVD/Blu-Ray discs. What an
interesting twist of history.

~~~
agumonkey
Exception sells and the past is quite rare these days.

------
derrickdirge
Reading this article about escaping from oppressive technology, when the page
turns off my music in order to try, and fail, to play an ad.

~~~
corvos
haha but adblock got the rest of us covered

~~~
derrickdirge
Does this work on mobile?

------
doctorpangloss
> The reason [for board games' popularity], Sax suggests, has only a little to
> do with the games themselves, and more with the desire to do something with
> other people

Sort of. One of the most important features of board games is that they're
comfortable to play while drinking. Sax's example of Snakes and Lattes, after
all, is actually a bar.

The digital gives us an alternative to typical entertainment, food, drugs and
alcohol.

------
Animats
The strange thing is seeing record players for vinyl that output to a USB
port. Or even Bluetooth. Huh?

------
johnchristopher
I'll play the Bourdieu card and simply say that it's all about the symbolic
gains you get in your tribe by possessing those artefacts. Nothing new under
the sun (I combo the Ecclesiastes card).

------
Daddy_cat
More tedious nostalgia for the glorious "time before phones",this time with
vinyl as a pretentious garnish. Can we please stop thinking this idea is new
or interesting?

~~~
germinalphrase
Perhaps a more interesting question then is _why does this tedious nostalgia
persist?_ If our new tools are not providing for our needs then we should
change them to do so.

~~~
svachalek
There are a few cases where we really are giving things up in the digital
world. I've yet to see a digital control that holds a candle to the good old
analog volume knob in terms of speed and precision of setting, for example.
E-books are better than paper ones in many ways, but paper still has the
advantage for sharing and certain aspects of navigation.

On the other hand, one big "need" is simply for the familiar, and another is
to be different from the crowd. Old timers will hold onto their vinyl because
it brings back memories that cannot be replaced, while young hipsters will buy
them because no one else their age is. Simply being modern prevents new audio
technology from fulfilling either need.

