MyATMPinIs1234

You often hear sentiments like this one, found in an article about the last reel tape manufacturer to go out of business (WSJ, today):

Jeff Tweedy, leader of the rock group Wilco, prefers to record music on reel-to-reel tape rather than on the digital equipment that has overtaken the music industry. Purists like him think it confers a warmth and richness to recordings that a computer cannot.

Nice theory, but wrong. You see, Jeff, the continuous waveform that you prefer can be completely determined by a Discrete Fourier transform and stored digitally. We've known this since 1928 [1] and it was proven in 1949 [2]. And when you want to listen to it, big guy, you can use the Nyquist-Shannon interpolation formula to recover it to the exact original. Just make sure the sampling rate is at least twice the bandwidth and you're golden.

Looking ahead to a tape-starved future, Mr. Tweedy has a fallback: The band has an archive of around 100 reels of tape it has used in recording its various albums. By splicing out and saving the final version of each song, he figures they can maintain the archive and also generate a supply of tapes that can be recycled for future recording sessions.

I know you are a musician and too cool to use computers, but that is ridiculous. It's not like we're asking you to do your liner notes in Powerpoint.

References:
[1] H. Nyquist, "Certain topics in telegraph transmission theory," Trans. AIEE, vol. 47, pp. 617-644, Apr. 1928.
[2] C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the presence of noise," Proc. Institute of Radio Engineers, vol. 37, no.1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949.