We like to think of analog as pure.

The microphone hears a continuous event. Analog preserves it. Digital chops it into numbers and does unspeakable things to the spaces in between.

Nice story.

It just isn’t true.

The only pure analog signal is the live feed coming directly from the microphone. The moment we decide to store it, we must convert it into something the recording medium can hold.

Analog tape costs us dynamics and frequency extremes. Direct-to-disc adds its own compression, distortion, and limitations—pleasant though some of those changes may be.

Early digital was worse. We listened, winced, and quite reasonably ran back to analog.

But in doing so, we began confusing the familiar sound of analog recording with the untouched microphone feed.

They are not the same.

To my ears, high-rate DSD—especially DSD128 and DSD256—gets closer to that microphone feed than any recording method I’ve experienced. PCM can get very close as well, particularly when it begins as DSD and is later converted.

That doesn’t make vinyl or tape less enjoyable. Enjoyment and purity are two different claims.

Analog has a sound many of us love.

Pure is what happened before we recorded it.