Analog Files

In some philosophical sense, no CD, or MP3 "really" reproduces the sound that it mimics accurately. The sound must be broken up into segments, each of which has a value for pitch, intensity, etc. Sadly, the fewer of these segments (Called samples by the way) that occur per second of recording, the lower the fidelity of a sound will be. And the more samples per second, the larger your file is. This tradeoff between sound fidelity and file size is an abomination. Not only is it a pain in the neck, but it is something of a lie. No matter how many samples per second you take, some data is still lost. One can argue that the data lost is about as important as the value of in infinitesimal in a calculus equation, but still I find this to be rather... displeasing. I propose a different system: Sounds should be stored on computers as an analog signal. Rather than running sounds through a DAC, run the microphone directly to the heads of the hard drive and move those heads like the needle of a phonograph. A file would have a digital header telling the computer how long the song is, and its coordinates on the hard drive, followed by this analog signal. When it comes time to play the song, the computer program seeks out the "header" file, and simply begins to move the read head over the analog signal at a set rate. Whatever value it finds there is sent directly through an amplifier (tube if possible for maximum anachronistic appeal) to your speakers. None of this lossy digital nonsense. Because hard drives are inherently designed not to corrupt their data over time the signal would not degrade as a cassette or record does. Because the sound is stored as an analog signal, there will be less data loss than there would be in even an "uncompressed" digital sound file. This would probably require a completely different file system than that used in most operating systems today, and for that matter, I believe that the hard drive's heads would need to be somewhat different from those that exist now. Hell, the disk substrate will need to be different too since I don't want the "bit" sized magnetic particles, I want an undifferentiated stream of the bloody things. And I, being a lunatic audiophile, do not care.