It isn’t just that the sample rate is too low, it’s the phase angler that drives me crazy. You record a vocal track on a good 24-track machine and what it spits out afterward, the wave forms match exactly. There’s a little bit of distortion which usually is considered a benefit, but the actual wave form is true. You can take a before or after, you make an analog onto your computer and then play it back, the wave form is completely different. The reason is the high frequency and the low frequency are no longer in correct timing with each other. It actually causes a shift. It’s very significant. For my purposes, where I double-track a lot of things, I double-track vocals, lead guitar and all the rhythm instruments. As I’m playing I lay down the original track, and as I lay down the double, I am listening to the way to the two tracks play against each other in the phase cancellation. That’s what really creates the magic with double-tracking. When it’s going the way I like it, I keep going. When it’s not I stop and go back and do it again. You can’t do that in digital because the basic digital signal plays you back a signal that has been phase-shifted. The live guitar or vocal combined with the recorded one sounds a lot different — the live track and the played-back track are not the same. Very few people know that. Anybody can do that experiment by recording on both a good old analog machine and on their computer at the same time and then playing the computer track back to the tape. You can’t get it to match up. With a tape machine, it’ll either reinforce and be twice as loud or you can put it out of phase and it’ll disappear.
Once we started relying on computers and networks to interact, we lost contact with the concept of physical decay and the process of aging. Instead an analog time span where things just sorta fade away, we have the almighty delete button. With the press of a button, content can be erased leaving virtually no evidence behind.