Victory Pete
Banned
Ah yes, it is these "Filters" that are not present, or needed in Analog "Real to Reel" Recording!
VP
Does analog move more air. . . ?
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Ah yes, it is these "Filters" that are not present, or needed in Analog "Real to Reel" Recording!
VP
Victory Pete
Banned
mshilarious
Banned
You are being either purposely obtuse, or you really just aren't that bright.
I'm pretty sure your decks are going to act as filters whether you like it or not. Are you going to do a proper analysis of your recorders or not? Because that scope view you posted could be 1% THD, could be less, could be more. Let's see the spectral analysis please.
mshilarious
Banned
OK let's try again. First I moved the image to my server:
You can see the converter loop has a few distortion peaks, at 14kHz and again from 18kHz to 20kHz. These are -125dB below peak signal (the sum of all of the sine waves peaks at -1dBFS), and -80dB below the individual sine wave peaks. We have a bit of rolloff above 19kHz, because I ran this test at 48kHz.
The cassette shows a much higher noise floor at around -100dBFS (integrated, that would be about 60dB dynamic range), significant flutter with modulation peaks at -70dBFS, or as little as -20dB below the sine wave peaks--and many more of them than the converter loop distortions, and in a more audible range--92Hz either side of the original sine wave signals, a bit of 60Hz hum. It also exhibits significant HF rolloff above 5kHz, and no response above 16kHz.
The distortion performance of the cassette is thus literally about 1000 times worse than the converter loop. Again, mostly flutter, a better tape machine should perform much better than that.
Maybe VP can lower his standards enough to send that signal through one of his machines . . .
Victory Pete
Banned
That is a "Cymbal"? Really?
Any "Filtering" my decks may do is not the same as A/D and D/A conversion. Conversion is not needed with my "Fleet of Decks".VP
mshilarious
Banned
C'mon VP, 100Hz, 1kHz, 10kHz THD from one of your decks. It's not that hard. You can do it. Flutter too if you are able.
Victory Pete
Banned
That is a "Cymbal"? Really?
VP
Reread my above post and please provide an answer. Also can you explain the "Jibberish" in your post above?
VP
mshilarious
Banned
No, you reread the post where I originally described the cymbal experiment, and note my description of it.
See, the basic problem is those who cannot understand signal analysis. If they did, they would be fairly happy with the 18/19kHz intermodulation analysis I posted. . . where the cassette didn't do too well.
The cymbal experiment shows that as signal complexity increases, the devices under test continue to behave in predictable manners, based upon our understanding of them from less complex signal tests. I knew that the cassette was going to suck bad on the cymbal test; I knew it was going to have serious problems with flutter and intermodulation distortion and frequency response, because I could see that on the sine wave and white noise source tests.
And therefore when I transferred the actual cymbal hit (which is even more complex of course, as initially described and posted) to cassette (I didn't post that, but I can), I knew it was going to sound badly distorted. And it did.
So we have learned that there is no such thing as a system that performs like crap on a sine wave yet still performs well on a complex signal (which is really just a whole bunch of sine waves). Circuits that choke on a 1kHz signal are not going to be good for accurate audio recording. Circuits that kick off a large amount of THD on a sine wave will probably have a significant amount of IMD. Maybe that 10% 3rd-order at 100Hz sounds good on a single harmonic instrument, but when you mix harmonically unrelated sources (like the cymbal experiment) through a system that generates a lot of THD you'll get a lot of IMD, which is harmonically unrelated distortion that most people tend to think sounds really bad.
You may be an "artiste" who records "musique", but if your recording system cannot pass a reasonably accurate facsimile of a square wave (of course a perfect square wave cannot exist), say at least a 20kHz bandwidth 100Hz square wave, it's not going to be in any way, shape, or form an accurate recording system.
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Now, your test results please. Seriously, we have been waiting a week, what is taking you so long?
We did a test a number of years ago at Phase Recording in College Park, MD. A 24-track analog Studer was used on an orchestral recording date. In addition to zone miss I had a Decca Tree with Three Neumann M150 miss going through GML Preamps to a iZ Radar 24 DAW. The house engineers very very pro analog. I challenged them to tell me what they didn't like about the Radar audio. Here's what happened.
mshilarious
Banned
Yes, it's a test of 31 sine waves mixed together; it's the spectral analysis of the cymbal.wav file routed through a converter loop (top) and cassette recorder.
mshilarious
Banned
The Studer and RADAR are both top quality machines, so that result is not a surprise to me. As I said very early on, I cannot tell which of my CDs are AAD vs. DDD, and they were mostly recorded 25 years ago.
Farview
Well-known member
Really, then how come you don't hear the high-level supersonic signal that carries the signal you are recording to the tape? Certainly, you don't think that the signal you feed into the tape deck is exactly what the head transfers to the tape...
Victory Pete
Banned
Oh, the 150kz bias signal? Well it certainly ain't from A/D D/A conversion!
You dont hear it because you dont have "Bat Ears". It is there.
VP
lonewhitefly
Active member
personally, I would never make any musical or audio decisions based on any "double blind" A/B-type testing. The immediately apparent differences between analog and digital are very subtle (virtually undetectable with the variety of variables in any test). The difference is more apparent over time and reveals itself as something that you "can't quite put your finger on". It's a kind of magical energy which is just not there in digital. And I think those who believe in magical energy may be more drawn to analog, while those who don't would easily choose digital because of the obvious practical advantages.
That said, there are also many practical advantages in analog as well (long-term archiving [i.e., future proof]), workflow, destructive nature, etc.)
Victory Pete
Banned
CrowsofFritz
Flamingo!
Exactly.
I guess I could be called an atheist when it comes to this magical energy.
I just can't hear it. I just figured many chose analog because it sounds "a million times better."
lonewhitefly
Active member
Exactly.
I guess I could be called an atheist when it comes to this magical energy.
Some people do like analog simply because they think it sounds better. And there are differences there too. For a variety of reasons, I can guarantee that I would be unable to get my recordings to sound the way I want them to with digital. With analog, I get the sound I want fairly quickly.
I am also fairly unique in that I really haven't ever recorded digitally myself. I've always been completely open to it, but over and over again, any attempts I've made have been frustrating. And there is no chart or graph or A/B comparison test that can explain away that reality to me.
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