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2.4 Digital Analogue
Topic 2.4 · Component 4

Digital & Analogue Audio

🎵 Real-World Examples

Vinyl vs CD — “General Comparison

Vinyl records reproduce sound from a continuous groove (analogue), offering characteristic warmth and subtle harmonic colouration. CDs store audio digitally at 44.1 kHz/16-bit, providing cleaner reproduction with greater dynamic range and no surface noise.

Daft Punk — “Get Lucky

Recorded largely through analogue equipment — vintage Neve console, valve preamps, and tape machines — to achieve warmth and character before being mixed in the digital domain. A textbook example of combining analogue and digital workflows.

Bon Iver — “Woods

Uses digital vocal processing extensively, layering Auto-Tune as a deliberate creative tool rather than a corrective one. The digitally processed, heavily quantised vocal sound is central to the track's aesthetic.

Jack White — “Various

Deliberately records using analogue equipment and lo-fi techniques — valve amps, tape machines, limited track counts. His approach embraces the imperfections and character of analogue recording as a creative choice.

What you learned

  • Understand the analogue-to-digital conversion process (sampling and quantisation)
  • Explain how sample rate affects frequency reproduction (Nyquist theorem)
  • Describe how bit depth determines dynamic range and quantisation error
  • Calculate file sizes from sample rate, bit depth, channels, and duration
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