Loved this. How is talking on a cellphone different from talking on a landline phone with "POTS" (plain old telephone service - analog over wire) and a carbon microphone? How does contemporary digital audio recording differ from quintessential analog audio recordings such as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds? How does our quest for pure signal (with no noise) change our listening experience and our experience of moving through space? ( )

This book is more than just a simple “back to vinyl” sermon, refreshingly. It’s a highly scientific and socio-psychological look at the history of recorded music, the transition from analog to digital, and what that means to people and society.

Damon Krukowski writes as a musician, music fan, and techno nerd, yet mixes this all together quite skillfully. He writes about context, signal, and noise in ways that will make sense to most readers.

Krukowski writes that people hear in stereo sound. That having two ears allows us to make the small, even tiny, mental distinctions providing much-needed context for the world around us. He tells one story, among others, of a person falling over while riding a bicycle wearing earbuds because, while they were focused on the sounds that were being delivered in their ears, they weren’t able to integrate and HEAR other sounds in the world around them. Krukowski asserts that our stereo hearing is incredibly accurate for providing context for what we actually hear (and need to hear, for the most part) while our brains separate signal from noise.

And what’s the distinction? The author explains that signal is the foregrounded sound we’re supposed to concentrate on, ie., music in this case, while noise is the allegedly “unnecessary” sounds that interfere with our being able to focus on signal. The role of technology in separating signal from noise provides the allegedly purer sound that one obtains through digital transmission, eliminating noise entirely. But the question is, is music without (analog) noise what we really want to hear? Krukowski makes the case that it is not.

Krukowski’s “The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World” skillfully examines the science, physiology, and effects of the changes from analog sound to digital sound, not only over time, but now in the rapidly changing musical media world in which we live. By putting our audio experience of recorded music into a bigger context of how people interact with the world, he offers a more intricate view than many who bemoan the emergence of digital music as it's experienced through devices like head phones, iPods, and even smartphones. He argues that the digital delivery of music replacing analog, tactile music has largely been responsible for the loss of community represented by now many distant-memory record stores where people could hang out, chill, and talk with others about music and other similar interests, while shopping for tangible, artistic items of value that one can hold and play and hear signal WITH noise. He then calls for the re-introduction of the noisy environment once surrounding all music, that would lessen the near-total isolation with which people now experience music.

The only reason I am giving this book 4 stars instead of 5 is that he sometimes gets caught up in going seriously too far into hard technology that one might need an engineering degree to fully appreciate, and the middle has an extended section that drags a bit as a result. However, he ultimately delivers a very thoughtful analysis at how rapid technological change leads to unanticipated social consequences that aren’t always good. A very interesting and decent book and recommended for all audiophiles, vinyl (and CD) enthusiasts, and music lovers in general. ( )

Krukowski, whose work in Galaxie 500 I enjoyed, goes about his task of writing this book as if he were a professor stuck with a class of exceptionally dense students. He sprinkles his text with unnecessary italics, apparently to assist the challenged. He belabors trite points as if they were brilliant insights of his own. And his first analogy, about analog vs. digital type (page 4), is hogwash. Instead of getting "twice as bad, every eighteen months" in an inverse of Moore's Law, digital typography started out bad, got worse for a few years as amateurs with cheap tools took over, and now is virtually indistinguishable from traditional letterpress, at least in professional contexts. The degradation of typographic standards that remains is largely due to the technology of typography becoming widely available. It has nothing to do with digital tech vs. analog tech. (I know something about this; I was part of the development team for Aldus PageMaker and Adobe inDesign in the 1990s and early 2000s. Digital tools for professional-grade typesetting have been available for twenty years.)

If Krukowski's authorial tone showed just a smidgen of humility, his book would be easier to swallow. Instead, we have yet another self-appointed authority who doesn't know what he doesn't know. Seems there's a lot of that going around these days. ( )