Essay: The Joy of Analog

( Look again. The digital watch, that fancy, snappy, high-tech hot ticket of just yesterday, is out. Not just for the aristocracy, for whom digital was always declasse. But for everyone, from the high school kids who fancied whatever was trendiest, to the stockbrokers who depended on it to record their jogging laps to the hundredth of a second. Last year digital imports dropped almost one-half. According to some estimates, sales have fallen from 20% of the jewelry-shop market ten years ago to 2% now. The people have spoken. Analog -- the old-fashioned watch, the one with hands, the one whose mystery lies in the relationship between Mickey's big hand and Mickey's little hand -- is back.

This is a rare triumph for analog. Digital -- digital everything -- came advertised as the wave of the future, and indeed has swept the world before it. The slide rule, a beautiful analog machine that ran on brainpower alone, fell before the hand calculator with terrible finality. By now it might as well be an Etruscan artifact.

And is there anything with a higher technological sheen today than laser-read compact disks, the magic of digitally recorded sound? The CD, as every follower of stereo ads knows, is about to send the LP, analog in vinyl, the way of the De Soto.

Analog even has an anachronistic look. What makes a '30s science-fiction movie instantly recognizable as a product of the '30s is the dials. Flash Gordon, fancy as he is, will forever, hopelessly, be turning dials. A glance at Star Trek, on the other hand, and you know that modernity has arrived. What gives it that look? Not Spock's ears, but the lovely Lieut. Uhura always fending off nefarious Klingons by frantically punching the keys on her console, the keys to the future.

Digital does not just look more modern. It is more modern. Analog devices represent reality as a continuum on which things (seconds, degrees, sound waves) are assigned a location. Romantic, but not quite as practical as digital devices. They represent reality as discrete intervals, each assigned some numerical value. And once chopped into numbered bits, reality can be manipulated with unnatural ease and in an infinity of ways by microprocessors. Digital is ideally suited to crunching, shaping and twisting by modern computers. Hence such dazzling achievements as synthetic speech, computer- assisted design and the visual effects that the most modest TV station can produce with the flick of a switch: images wrapped and flipped and squeezed ! and sometimes turned like pages.

But now the counterrevolution. First watches. Next, agitation in the musical precincts, where an audio elite is arguing that much of what you have heard about the inevitability, superiority, precision of the CD is a hype and a fake. "The greatest step backward in the history of audio," the president of the high-tech Sheffield Lab called digital some years ago. At the high end, the ultimate in sophisticated and expensive music reproduction, says New Republic Critic Edward Rothstein, "I have not heard a single compact disk that sounds as good as the identical (analog) record." Bring back the LP.