This is my first topic start, and I DON'T expect it to generate a lot of controversy.
But here it is.
As I'm typing this, I'm listening to a cassette tape of the Beatles (Let It Be) being played on a three head cassette deck, one of the last to be made before the CD revolution, through a twenty year old Yamaha amplifier/receiver, and a pair of really sh*tty speakers.
I've got the album on CD (digital) and I play the CD through the same amplifier and speakers.
I think analog, i.e. cassette or reel-to-reel (good luck finding that) sounds better than digital.
Which is to say that analog is, for human senses, a more accurate representation of the real world than digital.
A lot of people feel the same way. Ironically, the use of digital technologies allows me to create digital recordings which sound (to the human ear) identical to analog recordings. The difference between the two which is audible to the human ear has to do with a compression on the high frequencies, coupled with a slight, random tremolo effect due to the warping of the media being played, plus the fact that digital recordings tend to reproduce background noises slightly better. It's a fairly simple matter to emulate, actually. An EQ, an automatable tremolo and a noise gate along with a little manual EQ automation tends to do it well enough that your average musician would swear it's an analog recording. A person viewing the waveform however, could easily tell the difference, assuming that person knew a thing or two about recording.
But I understand exactly what you're saying. Analog recordings (or a digital facsimile of such) have a certain warmth and personality to them which is missing in digital recordings. Because digital recordings tend to include more background noise, it allows one the realization that it was recorded in a studio or recorded live, something which I and other musicians have speculated destroys the 'suspension of disbelief' that the music is simply emanating from the air around you, and thus taking some of the magic out of it.
QUOTE
If Penzias and Wilson had been dealing with digital equipment, rather than analog, would they have detected the CMB? Or would the extraneous 'noise' have just been filtered out?
I think they would have discovered it, assuming they were using digital technology with a resolution comparable to the analog equipment they used.