California, © 1978 by  R.C. Hörsch  (Image #877)

Analog v Digital Encoding

No photographic or sound medium is truly analog or continuous tone. Even the finest grain photographic emulsion is composed of either individual grains of silver halide (monochrome) or of discrete bits of dye or pigment (color) which are the exact equivalent of digital pixels.

The same is roughly true of music or sound recordings which are almost universally originally encoded on a magnetic medium in which the grains of iron oxide or other magnetic material are, again,  the exact equivalent of digital pixels. The exception, perhaps, being analog sound signals  recorded directly in a suitable medium (originally wax) by a vibrating needle. But even here, the ostensibly continuous variations in air pressure constituting sound vibrate at their respective frequencies which, in turn, are effectively digital and not analog.

All of this can be debated to the level of quantum physics but what most people are talking about concerning analog v digital photography and music is the subjective, perceived experience. A silver-gelatin photographic print has a seemingly unique quality as does music reproduced from a vinyl recording through vacuum tube amplifiers. No argument. However, all of the information encoded in the original, physical medium can also be translated and encoded digitally with no loss whatsoever given sufficient sampling, pixel depth and resolution.