I’m investigating replacing my tape based dictation machine with a new-fangled digital voice recorder. In building the case for a shift in technology I started thinking about the advantages of digital technologies. The world has apparently gone digital.
Advantages
The Quality Advantage — digital storage and transmission of audio and visual material retains the same quality with digital. This advantage is based on the fact that when an analog signal is duplicated some signal quality is lost. Each successive duplication results in further signal degradation. Digital signals on the other hand don’t suffer such a signal loss when duplicated. However the initial quality of the materials is important. Poor quality video will always be poor quality, whether it is stored digitally or not. And a corrupt digital signal can mean the loss of the whole rather than a glitch as may be noticed in the analogue form. Try dubbing a VHS tape over and over. Very quickly you will have nothing watchable. With DVD you get exactly the same picture (try DVDXCopy). That’s why movie studios want copy protection and Napster was so successful before it was shut down.
The Editing Advantage — Non-linear editing allows us to take pieces of digital information and re-arrange them at will (without a loss in quality as well). Splicing tape is a bit harder and you damage the original. With this also comes the ability to combine multiple sources into one. Think of any Hollywood special effects blockbuster and you’ll find it difficult to distinguish made up from real. This is testamount to the skills of the artists involved. If you’ve had the opportunity to listen to the Director’s commentary on Toy Story II you’ll gain an appreciation of how much effort goes into animating the emotions which make our favourite characters real.
The Portability Advantage — Digital comes with a portability that analogue doesn’t. Equipment is smaller because there aren’t the physical constraints of most analogue recording systems. And this is not just video or audio. My Palm Pilot contains my address book, my diary, several whole books and photos of my family. These all fit in a small pocket rather than a large bag (the 128MB memory card in my palm pilot is smaller than an Australian 10c coin or a quarter in the US). Compression technologies take this even further still, especially if you are willing to trade off some quality for size (MP3 is compressed music which literally throws away non-core data to reduce the size of a file, JPEG images are the same. And like the VHS tapes mentioned earlier recompressing a MP3 file or re-saving a JPEG file reduces the quality each time).
The Transmutation Advantage — One of the reasons for moving to a digital voice recorder is the ability to automatically transcribe what I’ve said to text. With digital it is much easier to change data from one form to another.
Disadvantages
The Power Disadvantage — No juice, no nothin’ Have you ever read a book where the words suddenly disappeared because the book ran out of power?
The Digital Divide Disadvantage — Not everybody has access to digital technologies. I see three main reasons for this. The first is obviously financial. The second is availability. Some technologies such as broadband internet are not available Australia wide. The third is capacity to understand. People who are not technically literate cannot unlock the advantages of digital technologies.
The Obsolescence Disadvantage — Digital technology is moving quickly and everybody knows that a new computer is out of date as soon as you’ve bought it. Yet here I’m writing of a more subtle obsolescence. It’s not that the parts don’t work anymore it that something better has come along and if you need some of that something better you often have to have all of it. I recently upgraded my CPU and in doing so required a new motherboard and new ram. What I had didn’t work with the new technology.