I made it through another week, and consider myself fortunate to have survived the flu that’s going around. Nasty stuff!

But I got through it, and now its time for our shoot the shit. I was going to talk about the gun control extravaganza but the argument is so ludicrous that it’s become disgusting. Our politicians have known since 9/11 that our country is vulnerable to terrorist attack; yet in spite of that knowledge, they have completely ignored our schools, the most vulnerable soft targets we have. What Cruz did in Parkland was no different than the night club shootings in Orlando, no different than the San Bernardino shootings, the Boston Marathon attacks and the Paris shootings for that matter. But, in typical political fashion, in an almost mindless discussion,  lets blame the gun. It’s remarkable that these people have a fully loaded compensation package of about $243,000 per year. The only person talking about hardening schools is Donald J Trump, Texas Gov. Abbot and Florida Governor Rick Scott. Disgusting!  But, this is not our topic so I’ll get off the soapbox before I get wound up.

Music is a wonderful thing, it enriches and communicates great emotion. When you listen to a violin you hear the resonance of the strings with the wood, you hear the violinist bowing as well as the resonance of the bow’s strings. A Stradivarius violin has a unique and identifiable resonance that’s communicated to the listener acoustically in the form of primary frequencies along with harmonics. The sound from musical instruments along with the sounds of your voice and what you hear are analog and not a binary stream of 1’s and 0’s

When a vinyl record is made, the analog track of an instrument is imprinted on the vinyl as it is captured by the microphone. It is the pure analog sound with all of its harmonics as it was generated by the instrument. Every nuance is captured with complete accuracy.

With the arrival of the digital age, we employed a technology called pulse coding modulation or PCM. PCM converts the analog signal from that violin to a digital stream of 64,000 bits per second.

What happens in PCM is that we electronically sample the analog sound wave 64,000 times per second to generate a digital stream. Because the sampling is not continuous, when we covert the digital stream to an analog sound, that we can hear, we can only approximate what the original analog sound was.

Increasing the sampling rate and improving the DACs (Digital to Analog Converters) gets us a more faithful analog reproduction; however, it is still a best effort approximation of the original analog sound. The reason that CDs sound better than vinyl is because the digital stream has a higher signal to noise ratio. It’s equivalent to speaking using a normal tone of voice in a quiet environment. Things sound cleaner . What you loose in a digital environment are those nuances and resonances produced by an acoustic instrument like a violin, cello and guitar.

Vinyl had a couple of bad things going for it. First, an LP takes up more space in a store shelf than a CD.  Second, people were completely uninformed on how to properly care for and LP. Records were being played with worn needles and heavy arms along with other physical abuse.

CDs have now vanished having been replaced by the MP3 and as music lovers, we’ve moved from a faithful rendition of an instrument to a sterile approximation.

Keep your turntable and buy vinyl, not for its collectable value but because short of a live performance,  it’s the only way you’ll get to experience a Steinway or Stradivarius.

Have a great weekend. Be safe and spend some quality time with your buds and family.