Beck you know very well, digital is not harsh. With digital, what goes in is what comes out. How can neutrality be harsh?
What you call harsh is the absence of your beloved analog tape distortion. You may as well call every microphone, every preamp, every vocalist and musical instrument in the world "harsh" because they "dont sound like analog tape"
As you once said, "better than live" And that's the trouble with real voices, real instruments. They just dont sound like analog tape...
No, wrong again my friend. If you don't know that I genuinely think digital is harsh and why I think it is by now, talking to you is like talking to the air. I've said many times that it's not simply a matter of analog adding something, but also digital adding something objectionable. Tim, your understanding of the formats in question is wholly lacking of technical insight. When you insist that “what goes in is what comes out” with digital, you're simply repeating age-old urban legend that started as marketing hype decades ago. That theory has never applied to anything but a hypothetical ideal digital system that has never actually existed. It is the greatest irony that you regularly come here treating those of us with a penchant for analog as being out of touch and outdated, when your ideas about digital have been abandoned decades ago by informed and experienced engineers. You're living in the past when digital marketing hype made big promises that in the intervening years have never been made good.
If what comes out of a digital recorder is exactly what goes in, then why do people argue incessantly over which is the best converter, the best DAW interface, etc? I’ll tell you why. Because they all have different sonic characteristics that lead people to prefer one over another. I have my favorite DAW interface that I think beats the pants off of models many times its price and many years newer. Some are made better than others. Some deal with upper mid and high frequencies better than others, where the sense of cold and harsh lives in the digital world. Which bit depth and resolution is better, Tim? 16/44.1? According to the “what goes in” myth it is. So why should we need 20/48 or 24/48 or 24/96, etc? We wouldn’t, now would we?
In the 90's ADAT was a huge success because now for $12,000 (the cost of three 8 track ADAT machines) a small project studio could do high quality 24 track digital at a fraction of the cost of the big pro digital machines like the Sony PCM 3324 at $150,000.
"Analog has outlived ADAT".
No, digital ADAT died because by the late 90's better digital HDD's came along. Digital tape was supplanted by digital HDD's.
I lived through ADAT. It was the new technology of my day and I was as excited about it as anyone else. However, it was a maintenance nightmare, was short-lived mechanically like a VCR and ate tapes for lunch, resulting in permanent data loss of biblical proportions. I didn’t say analog killed ADAT. I said analog has outlived it. That is, analog machines much older than ADAT are still functioning as they always have, while ADATs are in landfills by the thousands totally unusable.
From where we are today it's easy to take a cheap swipe at ADAT but it was the prosumer forerunner of HDD based recording which the vast majority of users today take for granted.
First of all, stop trying to give me history lessons about the progress of recording technology of any kind. If people want to know anything about that topic they ask me. I was there, experimenting and experiencing, and doing it right, with full grasp of all the technology at my disposal. As for ADAT in particular, it has nothing to do with taking a swipe (though I understand that would you look at the issue that way).
My input has everything to do with being a responsible member and steering people away from a dead technology that would cost people lots of wasted time and money to learn the hard lessons first hand. The only reason to acquire an ADAT today, if you can find one in good working condition, is if you had tapes or dealt with clients who had ADAT tapes that needed to transfer them to another format. Many of us here have been there and done that. That’s one of the reasons we’re here… to answer questions from being there… many, many years of experience with the technologies in question. Unlike you, I don’t answer the question if I don’t know anything about it. When I do answer a question you can bet you’ll get an informed answer.
Want my 2 DA38s?