It's hard to believe the first recording was made in 1877.
Years later, in the seventies, the first DAW was born, a version of Cakewalk,
As it has been since the mid 90's virtually every song, spoken word, is digital, Up untill ten years ago engineers did knock the quality of digital recording but never knocked the editing capability of it.
That was then, This is now..
One thing that has not changed in recording live music is that it all starts out analog. Instruments, microphones, pre amps, and mixers (for the most part) have always been and will always be analog.
In the past fifteen years everyone has migrated to digital, and all music today is processed digitally.
So what is the difference between Analog and Digital.
Analog recordings, buy it's nature had the majority of it's frequency content present in the mid bass to high mid range of the frequency spectrum. Usually between 100 Hz to 12,000 Hz. This was a result of the limitation of several factors, mostly analog circuitry and transformers.
Digital can record frequencies as low as 5hz and well beyond 20Khz.
Analog recordings captured less frequencies, had more masking of frequencies, and much less amplitude. This gave analog recordings a sound considered to be darker or warmer. This coupled with the dynamic range (that was typical in old analog recordings ) is why people liked analog. Engineers who came up during the analog days complain most about the advent of the brick wall limiter that is responsible for “The Loudness wars” it created.
The meat of the issue is the ability of digital to capture a wider range of frequencies. It also has a greater signal to noise ratio and less noise than old analog circuitry, This allows for a recording that has greater depth, stereo width, and the sense height that is beyond what was achieved in analog days.
