LP, CD, MP3, FLAC — telling analog and digital apart

🌀Two worlds — analog is continuous, digital is stairs

Analog carves the waveform physically, without breaking it up: the undulations of an LP groove, the magnetic signal on cassette tape — the wave itself lives on the medium. Digital instead samples that wave tens of thousands of times a second and stores numbers, ones and zeros. A continuous curve becomes a finely cut staircase. CD, WAV, MP3 and FLAC are all digital.

📊The three buckets

• AnalogLP (vinyl), cassette, reel-to-reel. The waveform is carved physically. Warm, but with surface noise and wear.
• Digital · losslessWAV, FLAC, ALAC — and CD. Ones and zeros, but nothing from the original is thrown away. WAV is uncompressed; FLAC and ALAC are losslessly compressed; CD is 44.1 kHz/16-bit.
• Digital · lossyMP3, AAC, OGG. Converted to numbers, then stripped of sound judged inaudible to shrink the file. Not reversible.

🔍How to tell in practice — by player and by sound

The player is the easy tell. A turntable with a stylus means LP, so analog; a cassette deck means tape, so analog. A CD player, phone or computer means digital. By ear, analog carries a characteristic warmth and a faint background hiss, while digital has a clean background but a quantised, stair-stepped signal.