Quotes & Sayings About Analog

Oftentimes, when people cut a record from analog tape to vinyl, they digitize the music first; I did a little investigating and discovered that most vinyl records that I've ever heard were digitized before they were put onto vinyl. — Kevin Shields

I started getting back into buying old analog gear while we were recording. Lots of old drum machines and synths. It wasn't a conscious thing. I didn't consider myself a collector, but boxes of vintage gear would turn up virtually every day. — Martin Gore

By digitizing a traditionally analog business model or process, we're effectively turning it into bits and atoms and enabling an infinite variety of possibilities. — Nicholas D. Evans

We live in a digital world, but we're fairly analog creatures. — Omar Ahmad

I like to work with a combination of analog and Pro Tools. I love the sound of analog tape, but there's so many things you can do with Pro Tools that would be incredibly difficult and very time-consuming with analog. — Kate Bush

No one disputes that online businesses offer much more variety than their analog counterparts. — Anita Elberse

But for me, if we're talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That's part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it's full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared to the go-go-go rhythm of an MP3, mix tapes are hopelessly inefficient. You go back to a cassette the way a detective sits and pours drinks for the elderly motel clerk who tells stories about the old days
you know you might be somewhat bored, but there might be a clue in there somewhere. And if there isn't, what the hell? It's not a bad time. You know you will waste time. You plan on it. — Rob Sheffield

I'm a very tactile learner, so I need analog index cards, moving them all about, trying out various sequences for the book's architecture. — Joshua Mohr

There is an old maxim that says that two empires that are too large will collapse. The analog in set theory is that two different theories that are too powerful must necessarily contradict each other. — Saharon Shelah

Maybe I just have everything backwards. Maybe it's a problem of perspective. In this Post-Modern Age perhaps it is the digital experiences we ought to cheer as "genuine " and not those troublesome and inconvenient analog ones.
Looking at it all fucking backwards. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

A lot of the records you buy, there's nothing you can hold in your hand, it's all 1's and 0's, this digital cloud floating in the ether. but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand. — Dave Grohl

I really love laser-cutting. I do a lot of laser-cut jewelry and laser-etched stationery. I'll even etch my food sometimes. You can download an image online and etch it onto a tortilla or a brownie. It's so cool to meld the digital and analog worlds together. — Brit Morin

You can't live in the digital and die in the analog. — Dean Cavanagh

Analog was perfected over 70 years, though. Digital will one day be fantastic. I'm sure of it. — John Vanderslice

Life is like a Tick mark. it is stable for a time. then it takes a ditch not because we are meant to be upset but to go higher and be better, you need to lean back and jump. life is like a ANalog signal it have its highs and lows.
i take it as 1st cycle of life with 90 degree rise.
Other's life look like a normal sign curve , they are lining a simple life with no trouble.
but we observe noise when we actually look closer. they have their own stuff though whihc they need to pull themself thorugh.
we get upset that we are not anything. i m done with life( i thought that when i was 16 and half, not sucide attempt and reason was i got pimples and scars). with time they healed well and so did my mentality to alot extent enough to oost within. point is we may think we are not good enough but you will be surprised to see that there are many other who want to be at your place and are counting on you. — Life

I love the immediacy of those old analog machines; it's really inspiring. You just set them up to play, and they go, playing the same thing until you switch the pattern. — Aaron Funk

Luckily for both the tech industry and Hollywood, there is only one thing that counts - use of the Internet is still growing exponentially, as consumers shift to digital everything from analog. — Kara Swisher

I don't think much about the digital world ... because I am in the analog world! — William Eggleston

Those folks who try to impose analog rules on digital content will find themselves on the wrong side of the tidal wave. — Mark Shuttleworth

I had the time to take the original analog tapes and fix all the things I didn't like, so all I left was essentially the benefits of the analog with none of the disadvantages. — Kevin Shields

Analog is more beautiful than digital, really, but we go for comfort. — Anton Corbijn

Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We'll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover. — Ben Gibbard

I really like the sound of analog things where clearly there's something being touched. You can sense that something is handmade. So much with digital, there's a disconnect. — Andrew Bird

All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn't find a speck of language lurking below the surface. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Reality is not digital, an on-off state, but analog. Something gradual. In other words, reality is a quality that things possess in the same way that they possess, say, weight. Some people are more real than others, for example. It has been estimated that there are only about five hundred real people on any given planet, which is why they keep unexpectedly running into one another all the time. — Terry Pratchett

I learned on film at NYU. I was probably the last generation that was analog. Anyone who was a year younger than me, it was probably all digital. — Colin Trevorrow

Analog sounds so much better. I frankly can't listen to digital audio for more than a few hours without really starting to hate what I'm listening to. Even decent 24-bit digital resolution really irritates me after a while. — Tom Scholz

We believe that the next generation of powerful mobile companies have a deep understanding of the world as a unified whole, where digital and analog experiences affect each other rather than transporting analog experiences into the digital realm. — Evan Spiegel

We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space. — Julian Jaynes

He put an arm around me and helped me across the lawn into the passenger's seat. The inside was red and white as a strawberry sundae, with black analog gauges. It was inefficient and sprawling; it screamed of hubris and excess and obsolescence; it was America on wheels. — Mishell Baker

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods. — David Mitchell

Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols - every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every "a" is the same as every other "a," and so on). As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because they are easily copied, transmitted, and error-checked. Unlike analog signals, they are not doomed to degradation over time and distance. That — Neal Stephenson

eBooks are just digital copies of analog books. Convenient, yes. But we have the technology now to rethink what a book is. — David Conger

What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?
...
The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?
In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon. — Kevin Kelly

Don't get me wrong: I can and do waste time on the Internet with the best of them, but in some respects, I am an embarrassingly analog guy. I am not on Facebook. I write whole books on yellow legal pads. I do not own a cell phone. — Jonathan Dee

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be. — Dave Grohl

We always get back to old soul singers like Nina Simone, and how her recordings sound. Also new music like Tobacco, or people that use a mixture of analog and electronic music. — Jose Gonzalez

One minute we're over here, the next minute we're doing something completely different. But it's interesting because you are producing so many things you couldn't do with analog. — Les Paul

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world ... concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. — Julian Jaynes

Both analog and digital developments have intensified the viral nature of sonic culture. — Kode9

The digital tools allow us to have control over what and how we can alter an image that was unimaginable in the era of analog photography. — Pedro Meyer

Regardless what technology is, I like analog too. — Lou Gramm

You are an analog girl, living in a digital world. — Neil Gaiman

We've clearly entered a period in which the analog of text is no longer important or relevant. All text will be electronic. I accept that fact. My house has thousands of books in it, and I've started to look at them completely differently. They now seem to me to be like antiquarian objects. Their use value has become negligible to me because I'm perfectly happy to read on an e-reader. — Will Self

I'm analog, Wall of Sound, old school to the core, and it's time to let my B side play. — Kirstin Cronn-Mills

I'd advise all aspiring game designers not to aim for money when developing a game, because unfortunately it is very rare for game designers to be able to earn a living by developing analog games. — Klaus Teuber

A good portion of my work with Tangerine Dream at the time involved film music, and I remember approaching it as any 23-year-old would - without much fear or respect. Also, Tangerine Dream was typically asked to deliver a monochromatic kind of score, the electronic-analog trademark sound that TD had become famous for following landmark films such as Sorcerer [Universal, 1977], Thief [MGM, 1981], and Risky Business [Warner Brothers, 1983]. — Paul Haslinger

There's something about looking at Super 8 films that is so evocative. You could argue it's the resolution of the film somehow because they aren't crystal clear and perfect,so there is a kind of gauzy layer between you and what you see. You could argue it's the silence of them. You could say it's the sound of the projector that creates a moodiness. But there's something about looking at analog movies that's infinitely more powerful than digital. — J.J. Abrams

There are a significant number of people who appreciate what we do, and most of them gravitate to Analog because this is where they can find it. The other magazines tend to share their audiences, which may result in each of them having a smaller market share. — Stanley Schmidt

As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene. — James Gleick

Personally, I just got one of these Vonage IP phones. It's actually pretty cool. It comes with one of these Cisco ATA routers where you just plug an analog handset in. — Rob Glaser

Algorithms are crude. Computers are machines. Data science is trying to make digital sense of an analog world. — Christian Rudder

One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is 'the analog I' around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized. — Aleksandar Hemon

discursive regimes of the late eighteenth century drew the figure of man into the sand, and even if he manages to survive the etching, typing, and storing of the late nineteenth-century analog media, he is certain to disappear with the compression of that sand into silicon. — Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

Analog components don't 'scale' as well as digital components, but integrating them into relatively mature 28 nm platforms will accelerate the connection of everything from watches, personal healthcare, and home appliances to automotive, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and industrial controls. — Henry Samueli

I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It's an early analog synthesizer; it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices - everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra. — Tom Waits

Digital might capture the dynamics of what I heard before it went to tape a bit more accurately, but on the other hand, when we'd switch from listening to the digital version to the analog, the change was so profound - the music would suddenly go three-dimensional, and it felt much more engaging. — Kevin Shields

Just as the digital dominance of the recording studio seemed complete, analog had its revenge. Musicians, producers, and engineers searching for the sound of the music that inspired them - roots Americana, blues, and classic rock - began thinking about how the process of recording affected the sound. These artists, including White, Dave Grohl, and Gillian Welch, began experimenting with old tape machines and vintage studio equipment, returning to the analog methods they'd once used. Critics and fans noted that these albums sounded different - more heartfelt, raw, and organic - and the industry began to take notice. — David Sax

Boys' brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive. — Philip Zimbardo

I remember disassembling and putting an old analog alarm clock together. It was a lot of fun figuring out why it still worked with that one spring missing. — Markus Persson

No one has any faith in the tape anymore - everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don't. I think an analog tape is something you can hold. — Dave Grohl

A lot of musicians like to do the bass and the drums with analog and get that tape distortion that's really beautiful. As far as the digital world goes - it's all going to end up there anyway, but when you hear vinyl it does a different thing to you. Nowadays, people do CDs and then vinyl so it's everything goes; it's a such a beautiful world. — David Lynch

We are analog beings living in a digital world, facing a quantum future. — Neil Turok

Lamentably, alien audiences may be frustrated by the switch to digital television. That's because the transmitter power for DTV is fairly evenly spread across the spectrum. The spikiness is gone, and from afar, the attention-grabbing squeals of analog television's carriers have been replaced by DTV's smooth, low hiss. — Seth Shostak

My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they're two or three? Chimpanzees don't dance. — Oliver Sacks

I am an analog, slide-rule kind of guy. — Baba Kalyani

But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies. — Rob Sheffield

I prefer recording drums in the analog format, but that does not mean I would only do it that way. — Randy Castillo

The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety of topics before you open up the section that most closely matches your existing passions and knowledge. — Steven Johnson

Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment ... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator - an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus. — James Gleick

Steve Jobs in a new analog way: by sending snail mail. The U.S. Postal Service has approved a commemorative stamp honoring the Apple co-founder to be printed as part of a collectible series next year. Stamp subjects are traditionally kept a secret until just before printing to raise public demand, however, — Anonymous

In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is. — Douglas Rushkoff

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first. — Julian Jaynes

The very nature of limiting something from an infinite to moments in time creates distortion; analog recording methods create all kinds of distortion, they're just not digital distortion. — Kevin Shields

Analog, electronic, whatever it happens to be, I simply love and adore literally every aspect of making music. — John Lydon

As so much music is listened to via MP3 download, many will never experience the joy of analog playback, and for them, I feel sorry. They are missing out. — Henry Rollins

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words. — Samuel R. Delany

The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC. — Frank Herbert

We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents. — Virginia Heffernan

We have all this digital equipment, and sometimes this analog stuff comes back and people say "Oh my god!" It makes a different sounding music. — Sam De Jong

I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well. — Peter Guber

In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era. — Steven Spielberg

Digital for storage and quickness. Analog for fatness and warmth. — Adrian Belew

The anorexic is the fuse nakedly exposed to the direct power of modern media, a psyche whose wiring has no insulation. The anorexic is an analog to the ideologue, who is likewise devoid of common sense, independent ego, culture, intuitive intelligence, etc.: all the ideologue has to orient himself by is the formalist or abstractivist directives inlaid in modern mass-culture. Both are forms of the True Believer, minds in whom factors of self-active life are reduced to negligibility and pathos reigns. — Kenny Smith

The Obama administration, like those before it, promotes a disturbingly narrow interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, misapplying the facts of old analog cases to a radically different digital world. — Barton Gellman

I think the whole obsession with old gear is completely overblown. You don't need old-fashioned gear to make a great-sounding record. You don't even need [analog] tape. — Tony Visconti

Every console, I don't give a damn if it's analog or digital-hell, every mixing situation today-is the brainchild of Bill Putnam. — Bruce Swedien

In music, we can still record analog and then do the post production in digital. In film, sooner or later, we're not even going to be able to film because they won't be able to process. The labs won't exist anymore. You'll just have to do it with digital. — Mathieu Demy

Radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers, which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky. And just like the signals that we send and receive here on Earth, we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques. — Honor Harger

Analog, or Asimov's Magazine, or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. — David Brin

... I'm afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important ... it's almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they're robots and forget altogether that they're real, living people ... but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that's why I'm afraid for the world," Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried.
"So am I ... but I'll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they'll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards," Alecto explained. "I'm sure that they'll be able to realize how wrong it all is ... even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it. — Rebecca McNutt

Objects obey quantum laws- they spread in possibility following the equation discovered by Erwin Schodinger- but the equation is not codified within the objects. Likewise, appropriate non-linear equations govern the dynamical response of bodies that have gone through the conditioning of quantum memory, although this memory is not recorded in them. Whereas classical memory is recorded in objects like a tape, quantum memory is truly the analog of what the ancients call Akashic memory, memory written in Akasha, Emptiness- nowhere. — Amit Goswami

It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn't have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real walking, with any real experience of walking. And it confirmed for me what I'd really known all along, that walking isn't much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That's why I love it and love doing it. And in that respect
stay with me on this
it's not entirely unlike a martini. Sure you can add things to martinis, like chocolate or an olive stuffed with blue cheese or, God forbid, cotton candy, and similarly you can add things to your walks
constraints, shapes, notions of the mapping of utopian spaces
but you don't need to. And really, why would you? Why spoil a good drink? Why spoil a good walk? — Geoff Nicholson

I don't have any computers in my studio, it's all analog tape. All analog tape, all old equipment, I mean my mics are like from the 60's and early 70's, everything in there is old. — Adrian Younge

I know what it means to be moved by a book in my body so much that I go looking for its analog in the real world.
[From an interview with Complex magazine, 12/2012] — Junot Diaz

The campaign of character assassination waged [against President Clinton] by the right was a singular, unprecedented effort. Nothing like it exists on the left. What I object to on the right is the obsessive hatred, the bigotry, and the personal savaging of their opponents, all achieved through an echo chamber of talk radio, the Internet and Rupert Murdoch's media outlets. That kind of well-funded disinformation campaign has no analog on the left. — David Brock

We don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet
and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock
open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it
puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it. — Steve Jobs

When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is. — Dave Grohl

Well, I think first of all, probably the most fundamental thing is that we are a mixed-signal analog semiconductor company, which, along with some of the other well-known names in the industry, enjoys very good economics. — David Milne

When documents were analog, they were protected by government laws against unreasonable search and seizure. When they live in the cloud ... the ground is shifting. — John Battelle