Analog??? Absolutely. When the often-incompatible digital standards involved in DTV (digital TV), DTS (Digital Theater Systems, a movie sound standard), THX (Thomas Holman's movie sound standard), DVD-A (audio DVD), and lots more to come finally resolve themselves, if you've nailed your audio master to the wrong format, you're history. Analog endures, because it is, well, a direct representation of reality, not encoding. Codes change, reality doesn't.

On the recording studio end, to tailor your master for the Net, keep several things in mind.

Use: lots of audio compression (your eventual codec will love you for it), selective EQ (get rid of non-essential or accidental audio bandwidths by using noise gates, dispensing with extreme frequencies high or low), and favor similar sound sources (lots of analog/digital blending will give you problems down the line).

Don't use: noise reduction like Dolby or other perceptual encoding algorithms, and in general don't make your recording dependent on dynamic range. Beginning to sound like a dull record already? Well, codecs - the software devices that grind your music into digital powder to be squeezed through tiny pipes over the Net - are machines with zero aesthetic sensitivity and they are your unwilling partner for the moment, so get along with them as best you can.

To give you a better idea of the codec challenge, let's look at the numbers. Normal audio recording is a tricky enough game, but when you're trying to take an analog signal and convert it to a digital 44,100 samples/sec. x 16bits x 2 channels, or 1,411,200 bps (normal CD standard), and reduce that to only 32,000 bps to fit into 56k modem, you have to give up a lot, and that is the name of the game. Not only do you need the aforementioned audio compression (that keeps the volume up to the level the codec likes while avoiding distortion), but you have to trim off everything else that can be got rid of that the ear can't hear but the codec can, like background noise, frequency ranges that aren't used by the voice or instruments involved, and so on. You're talking more than trade-offs here, you're talking digital triage. Better to make your selective sacrifices ahead of time, rather than let a machine of unfamiliar lineage do it for you.