Older speedometers are analogue. Clocks with hands are analogue. In fact, anything that indicates a quantity using a needle is analogue.

By this we mean that the value of the quantity is indicated in some proportion to the quantity itself. The simplest example is a balance beam, which has a fixed weight on one side and the weight that is being measured on the other, with the deflection of a needle indicating the mass of the weight being measured.

Digital storage is the storage of information as a number in an electronic system. Digital storage has only been around for about 70 years. In any digital thing, there is an inherent inaccuracy. Imagine that we are going to represent colours using digital values. Say we represent red as being 101010 and yellow as being 201010. Then we can represent a colour which is, say, ‘slightly less red’ as 101011 and ‘slightly more red’ as 101001, where only the last digit changes for the two variations of red.

However, because there are no decimal fractions in our system, there is a colour, call it ‘slightly slightly less red’, which cannot be represented as a number. This is the inherent inaccuracy in digital systems.

When compact discs (CDs) first came out, they were hailed as a marvel. The vinyl records only had a maximum of about eight songs (or tracks) per side, whereas the digitally encoded CDs had up to 30. So, no longer was it necessary to go and buy the double album; you could just get the CD. CDs were free of scratches and background hiss and, as a consequence, people thought them better than vinyl in terms of reproduction.

When it became desirable to store music in handheld devices like the iPod, it was evident to the designers that they certainly could not store all the information that a listener would get from a vinyl record. A single vinyl track, for example, if digitised accurately, would occupy about 180 MB of memory. This amount of memory cannot be easily transmitted, recovered or played.

The computer people came up with the MP3, a data format which discards the sounds that it is perceived that people cannot hear and compresses the balance. This gives them a size as little as one-twentieth of other formats and allows them to be transmitted and stored efficiently. This affects the dynamic range (the range from softest sound to loudest).

In my office, none of us ever believed that reproduction from CDs or MP3s was as good as vinyl. One of our student experiments was to give the student a small loudspeaker and a CD recording, an MP3 recording and a vinyl recording of the same song (for those of you interested, it was Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car or Santana’s Earth’s Cry Heaven’s Smile). I would say to them, take the sound level meter and work out the dynamic range of the loudspeaker. It would take them one hour to one-and-a-half hours before they came back, with the speaker blown. And, yes, they had managed to do all the measurements with the CD and MP3, but the vinyl dynamic range was so great that they cooked the loudspeaker. I explained to them that this is because vinyl recording is analogue recording and completely true. There are some inaccuracies here and there but no inherent inaccuracy and all those things that a CD and an MP3 suppresses were essential in human listening.

There are now people who are waking up to the potential of vinyl recorded music. Vinyl records are becoming increasingly popular.

Storage space and data speeds are increasing way beyond the level they were when MP3 was created. It is, thus, quite possible that we will be able to create a CD (or DVD) that has up to 20 GB of storage space and a computer or device that can download very rapidly. When this happens, analogue and digital recording and storage will become one and we will reach a new milestone – not that anybody will notice. But for me, Santana on vinyl is still tops. Give it a try.