Do you think that the day will come when high definition digital or something fixes all these problems with digital?
It’s very hard to say. We keep hoping! (laughs). It’s a real catch-22 because a lot of the problem with digital is that fewer and fewer recording engineers are working on things. It’s become a thing of now you just ask anybody who’s hanging around to do the tracking and then you save lousy tracking in the mix, save lousy mixing in the mastering, etc. One of the biggest problems with digital is just that it is not idiot proof.
You need to know that every time you perform some math on that signal, you’re gonna degrade it and it’s not magic. It’s like analog: with analog you just really carefully thought through “How can I go the least number of generations, how can I not damage this.” With digital, it’s been sold as this bulletproof thing, so people often just don’t realize that they’re completely ruining their audio.
