The Joy of Analog

By Charles Krauthammer

( Look again. The digital watch, that fancy, snappy, high-tech hot ticket of just yesterday, is out. Not just for the aristocracy, for whom digital was always declasse. But for everyone, from the high school kids who fancied whatever was trendiest, to the stockbrokers who depended on it to record their jogging laps to the hundredth of a second. Last year digital imports dropped almost one-half. According to some estimates, sales have fallen from 20% of the jewelry-shop market ten years ago to 2% now. The people have spoken. Analog -- the old-fashioned watch, the one with hands, the one whose mystery lies in the relationship between Mickey's big hand and Mickey's little hand -- is back.

This is a rare triumph for analog. Digital -- digital everything -- came advertised as the wave of the future, and indeed has swept the world before it. The slide rule, a beautiful analog machine that ran on brainpower alone, fell before the hand calculator with terrible finality. By now it might as well be an Etruscan artifact.

And is there anything with a higher technological sheen today than laser-read compact disks, the magic of digitally recorded sound? The CD, as every follower of stereo ads knows, is about to send the LP, analog in vinyl, the way of the De Soto.

Analog even has an anachronistic look. What makes a '30s science-fiction movie instantly recognizable as a product of the '30s is the dials. Flash Gordon, fancy as he is, will forever, hopelessly, be turning dials. A glance at Star Trek, on the other hand, and you know that modernity has arrived. What gives it that look? Not Spock's ears, but the lovely Lieut. Uhura always fending off nefarious Klingons by frantically punching the keys on her console, the keys to the future.

Digital does not just look more modern. It is more modern. Analog devices represent reality as a continuum on which things (seconds, degrees, sound waves) are assigned a location. Romantic, but not quite as practical as digital devices. They represent reality as discrete intervals, each assigned some numerical value. And once chopped into numbered bits, reality can be manipulated with unnatural ease and in an infinity of ways by microprocessors. Digital is ideally suited to crunching, shaping and twisting by modern computers. Hence such dazzling achievements as synthetic speech, computer- assisted design and the visual effects that the most modest TV station can produce with the flick of a switch: images wrapped and flipped and squeezed ! and sometimes turned like pages.

But now the counterrevolution. First watches. Next, agitation in the musical precincts, where an audio elite is arguing that much of what you have heard about the inevitability, superiority, precision of the CD is a hype and a fake. "The greatest step backward in the history of audio," the president of the high-tech Sheffield Lab called digital some years ago. At the high end, the ultimate in sophisticated and expensive music reproduction, says New Republic Critic Edward Rothstein, "I have not heard a single compact disk that sounds as good as the identical (analog) record." Bring back the LP.

One must not exaggerate. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will not be twisting dials. With a spacecraft rounding Uranus at 42,000 m.p.h. 2 billion miles away, they prefer the sureness of digital to the romance of analog. And yet it is a small modern pleasure to see waves of the future meet some resistance. The new Lincoln Mark VII LSC has gone back to analog gauges. In the year of old Coke and narrative radio, hail the return of the analog watch.

Why has it come back? There are the obvious reasons. After a decade, people have discovered that you don't really need to know the time to the millisecond while waiting for the Seventh Avenue express. Nor do you have to know what time it is in Tokyo right now. (If you live outside Tokyo, that is. And inside Tokyo, analog will tell you just fine.)

Perhaps a social stigma now attaches to digital watches. People see you walking around with a bunch of numbers on your wrist and they get the idea that maybe you couldn't tell time otherwise. Never got the hang of it in school. Like reading with your finger tracing the words, guiding your eye. Who wants to be seen carrying a crutch on his wrist?

And there are the aesthetics. It is very hard to make numbers look beautiful. Functional, perhaps, but never elegant. In fact, when analog watches really want to look beautiful, they leave out the numbers altogether.

In a narrow sense, analog does also contain more information than digital. The sweep of the second hand defines every possible infinitesimal unit of time. But for most of us that is not the appeal of analog. After all, the extra information is of no use. It whizzes by too fast for the human eye to apprehend. When you ask someone for the time and he answers, "Four fifty-six and thirty-seven seconds," you know he's wearing a digital watch. If the fellow next to you has an analog watch, you might not even have to ask him. You simply lean over, and by noticing the general arrangement of the watch's hands, you know where you are in the day, even before the exact time registers in your brain as a number.

That is the beauty of analog. Because -- like its linguistic companion, the analogy -- it tries to reproduce the contour of reality. It lives in context. There is a before and an after. The digital watch gives you precision, but leaves you wondering where you are. Analog is a return to a certain harmony that the digital world chops away. Thus analog is able to capture qualities that digital never will. Only the LP, concludes Rothstein after truly heroic experimentation, can convey, say, the piano's quality of "attack and decay."

Digital gives you "just the facts, ma'am." And digested. Digital arbitrarily cuts up the continuum of information into bite-size bits, selects pieces and presents them back glued together to simulate the original continuum. That makes for efficiency. Because numbers can be instantly checked for errors and instantly re-sent, digital information can be transmitted over vast distances and through imperfect media without distortion. It arrives intact at the other end, ready to be turned back into a whole. But not quite the whole.

The digital watch tells you the time. It does not represent it. The digital watch may be going the way of the dodo because all that fact makes for too much bulk and too little lift.

Or to put it another way: analog is to digital as rhyme is to reason. Try putting that in digital form.