Before digital-format music CDs came out in the 1980Æs, music was often recorded in analog format on phonograph records or tape cassettes (Brain). Analog and digital solutions work quite differently, though, and yield different results, even when they are designed to accomplish the same type of process. For example, listening to music in analog by playing a cassette tape on a cassette tape recorder is unlike playing music recorded digitally on a CD in a CD player. The sound quality is vastly dissimilar, for one thing. Analog sound quality is far inferior to digital sound quality. While listening to music on tape, one can hear the tape player operatingùthe whirr of the spindles turningùas well as hissing and background noise on the tape. Tapes can skip if not fed through the tape heads by the tape player at a constant rate and tension, but this never happens on CD; CDs do skip if dirtyùin which case they can be easily wiped cleanùor scratched; CD players not designed to be played while in motion can also skip due to motion, a disadvantage that does not exist with tapes. On CD, the sound of the player is minimal to nonexistent, and there is no background noise whatsoever. Digital format is a much more precise technology than analog, and the difference in sound quality is quite noticeable, even to the untrained ear. This difference alone makes the digital solution preferable to the analog.
In addition, though, accessing songs in analog is a time-consuming manual process. It is impossible to go directly to any song on the tape; instead, one must either play the tape until one arrives at the desired song, or fast-forward or reverse repeatedly until one finds the song. Since songs are recorded sequentially on the tape, and the tape will only allow sequential access to them, one must go through all of the intervening songs either at normal or fast speed in order to get to the one that one wants to listen to.
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