Below is a story I recounted elsewhere a while back. On the subject of “digitalitis.”:
This reminds me of an effect and experiment we used to perform in the early days of digital. It was interesting proof that something was not right in the process—enough so to cause physiological weakening.
Allow me to explain:
First off, this was in the mid-1980s. Studios were just beginning to actually lay tracks with the digital tape machines of the day—not just digitizing in the mastering step for CD release. So even with vinyl LPs still being dominant, we were seeing releases that were DDA (digital tracking, digital mastering, analog pressing).
My friends and I were strictly into vinyl back then. Typical CDs and CD players at the time were unequivocally pretty unnatural sounding. But so were some of the DDA LP releases.
So here was the test/experiment (I don’t remember which of my friends brought it to our group or where he heard of it from; supposedly there was some “doctor” who had stumbled upon it as related to digital recording):
1) With no music playing, one person would hold their arms straight out to the side—making themselves into a giant “T”.
2) Another person would come up to the “T” man, put their hands on top of the outstretched arms—at the wrists—and try to push the arms down. Strong resistance would be felt.
3) An LP would be played—at just average volume—and about 30 seconds into it the above test would be repeated.
The results were always consistent:
If the album played was all analog or even (if I recall correctly) ADA, the person with their arms out would have good resistance to the downward pressure by the other person.
If the album played was DDA (meaning the tracks were laid down digitally at the start), the outstretched arms could not resist the pressure and would quickly pressed down all the way to the sides. No matter how hard the person tried to resist!
Now before you cry fowl on a couple of obvious points, let me state that:
a) After the “weak” showing we could always go back to silence or to a known all-analog LP and the person-under-test’s strength would return;
b) While the person pressing the arms down of course was affected as well, their leverage and weight were enough to overcome that.
The best part of this story—which would even overcome any doubts we ourselves had at the time—is that one of the participants of our group was a giant 6-foot 4-inch guy with arms like tree trunks, and they were nearly all muscle. (Dick S., hello wherever you are.)I was this short, skinny 135 pound kid.
The first time we had him participate in the experiment we did not tell him anything. So we have him hold his arms out and I had to reach way up to him—and his arms were so long I could not quite stretch to the top of his wrists. I was literally hanging from this big strong dude, with my feet off the ground and knees bent up.
So then we put on some random track from Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” album (which we knew from past experiment was DDA and would demonstrate the effect). I go back to this tree of a man (and he did have a couple minutes rest already), and this time I pull his arms right down. Admittedly I had to push somewhat hard, but I did not do anything different than before and there was zero chance of his holding me up or preventing me from pushing his arms down.
[As I recall, he became slightly angry at this. Perhaps from pride, perhaps from the weirdness of the sound being able to have that affect on his muscular build. He probably resisted going to digital for a couple decades after that—I don’t really know as we have not kept in touch. Likely was not too much of a problem as I recall he was a big classic jazz fan, and ALL that stuff is all analog.]
I honestly have not thought about or performed the experiment again since about 1993. Presumably digital recording has gotten a lot better since then (not mentioning the playback side since when we did those tests it was with LP turntables, so it was the recordings). And I do not know the physiological mechanisms that caused the weakening effect. Some sort of non-linear digital distortions that threw our vestibular system off? I have no idea as I am not a doctor. But the experiment was quite repeatable and I would be curious to learn of others who had performed it.
