limitations of MD

[Alexandre Enkerli]

> 	... but it is my understanding that MD technology is not useful
> for anyone who plans to do acoustic analysis of sound recordings later
> on, or to preserve that possibility for other researchers
That's right. It's a "lossy" algorithm. Same thing with MP3s. In fact,
they both use psychoacoustical phenomena to simply get rid of the parts
of the sound that can't be heard (due to masking effects and such).
This means that you really loose some of the information that's in the
signal but that this loss shouldn't affect the perceived result.
But that doesn't mean that this technology can't be used for interviews
and verbal transcription.
In ethnomusicology where both sound quality and archiving are
important factors, the recommendations are still in favor of analog. DAT
tapes have not been tested for longevity and DAT recorders are usually
very fragile for most field situations. Which doesn't mean that digitizing
is out of the question, just that digital documents are not very good for
archival purposes.

Who's doing what with digital recording in the field?