Digital Errors

We might like to think of digital recording as being perfect, but errors do sometimes occur. Mark Cousins explores the hidden imperfections of the binary age...

In a time before digital recording, an engineer’s job required actively spotting and preventing signal degradations that plagued analogue recording – albeit noise, distortion, wow, flutter or high frequency generation loss. Now that we’ve all grown used to recording in the digital domain, our ears have, to some extent, switched off to many of these concerns – we simply trust that a digital recording will be a near flawless representation of the original sound. But beneath this thin veneer of digital perfection, things can easily go wrong. What’s even more worrying, though, is that because digital recording does such a good job of papering over the cracks, you might not even be aware of degradation occurring – that is, until it’s too late.

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 32
Filed under Ten Minute Masters

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