What are the advantages of digital audio recording?

Answer 1

When things audio was being recorded analog on tape it was difficult to edit. Often times this required splicing the tape or just re-recording the track. With digital editing you can just click and edit. If you make a mistake you can undo it and try again. It's not nearly as destructive as analog editing was.

Answer 2

Digital recording has many advantages over analog recording one of which is the fact that digital audio recorders have become very inexpensive in the last 10 years and have enabled even the most novice musician to be able to record at a level that was previously only available in an expensive and high end multi-track recording facility. Digital recording doesn't just benefit the novice, engineers in large facilities are now able to do things impossible in an analog environment. The first benefit of digital recording is the ability to record multiple performances of an artist without erasing the previous take or having to use an additional track. Even in the event that a performance is accidently overwritten, the engineer can simply "undo" the mistake. Sometimes a musician may have a single mistake in an otherwise perfect performance, before the musician might have to punch-in the part or in extreme cases the engineer would literally take a razor and cut a single portion of tape out and replace it with another; but now non-linear editing is both simple and efficient. A performance can be pieced together, rearranged, shortened, doubled, or even created one note at a time. Another benefit of digital recording is the ability to offer high quality audio because a track can be preamplified, then converted from analog to digital (at a sample rate up to 192 kHz and up to 24 bits resolution) and stay in the digital domain until it is converted back to analog by the final end user. Although the higher sample rates and resolutions are available, anything above the standard compact disc sample rate of 44.1kHz and 16 bits resolution is considered beyond the range of human hearing. (Range of human hearing is 20 Hz to 20 kHz and sample rate must be at least twice the highest frequency desired hence 44.1 kHz) The biggest "complaint" of digital recording is the lack of "warmth" inherently found in tape. Another drawback with digital is that a song can start to sound constructed rather than performed when every instrument is highly edited and the end result is a song that has never been "performed." Although digital does have some drawbacks, it has allowed many more people the ability to create high quality recordings at a fraction of the cost just a decade previous.