Let's Get Physical

Industries Such As Music, Photography And Even Computing Are Switching Back From Digital To Analogue. Mike Bedford asks If This Is A Short Term Fad Or The Herald Of Better Products For Consumers

According to a large swathe of public perception, digital equates to good while analogue means bad, so a current trend might appear paradoxical. During 2017, sales of vinyl records enjoyed an increase of 26.8%. It wasn’t a flash in the pan, either – this analogue music format has seen a year-on-year growth in sales since 2007, when it nearly died out, with just 210,000 albums sold. Sales of 4.1 million records in 2017 might be small compared to CD sales, let alone streaming, but sales of those little silver discs have declined drastically over the past decade, and the fall continues. Indeed, there’s a very real possibility, only a few years hence, that the vinyl LP might be alive and well while its successor – the one that promised ‘perfect sound forever’ – is consigned to the history books.

It’s not only in the realm of recorded music where analogue is making a comeback. Remember film – those reels of light-sensitive material that were used in cameras before the digital revolution? It too has seen a resurgence of interest, with one of Kodak’s best-known films now back on the market. And there’s more. The technology that’s most firmly linked to digital techniques is surely computing, so any talk of an analogue computer revolution is surely inconceivable. Yet current research suggests that even this most unlikely analogue comeback is not as ridiculous as it might appear.

So have we been sold a fallacy in believing that the future can only ever be digital, or is there really a continuing place for analogue technology? Over the next few pages, we’ll find out.

ANALOGUE VERSUSDIGITAL