dr_sills said:
Consider the paradigmatic changes in photographic processes of the last 20 years to the equivalent changes in the audio recording industry: where obviously lossy, degenerating media like vinyl disks are rarely used outside of specialized creative applications ("mixing"), so too is film becoming the medium of expert expression. But: the end of the popular vinyl recording format has left little effect on popular music (beyond a couple of linguistic twists: we still buy "albums," for example), where chemical photography has determined all of the standards by which photographs of the present day are measured and established the logic by which they are produced.
I'm unsure what you know about audio recording, so the attempted analogies don't seem very applicable. No one ever recorded to vinyl directly for commericial use. Originally, cutting lathes (turntables with heavy platters and huge synchronous motors to reduce wow and flutter) were used to make the master. The masters were cut directly from the microphone onto metal master plates - hence the need for a "cutting lathe." Later mixing boards were added so that multiple channels (instruments, vocals) could be summed and sent to the cutting lathe.
That was the last time live audio recording was a true translation of the performance with no enhancements.
As soon as magnetic recording equipment became commercially available - the recording industry changed dramatically. Multi-tracking, multiple takes, etc. changed the entire dynamic of the recording process - this was a huge paradigm shift from direct recording. But, let's be clear, the paradigm shift has nothing to do with whether the distribution media is LP vinyl or CD. In fact digitally recorded music can be released on vinyl LP's if desired.
Today, the same arguments in photography about digital versus analog are used in the recording industry with some engineers adamantly insisting that tape still sounds better than digital recording processes (see "alsihad" in the Adventures of Mixerman for reference).
There is however, a middle ground in digital recording, with even the tapeheads mostly agreeing the RADAR system sounds equivalent to tape and not like the digital sound of Alsihad (a joke name for a certain professional computer-based digital recording system - I used it 'cause it's alls-I-had).
Nonetheless - all of the terms created from the original direct cutting recording through tape recording are applicable to digital recording with some new terms (like punch-in and punch-out) added to describe techniques that are only available through digital recording.
Not unlike the application of wet darkroom terms to actions in computer photo editing programs. It's a common language understood by people using the system so there's no need to invent new terms because of a shift in technology.
