C
Chibi Nappa
New member
Try the experiment yourself. Get on an analog board and A/B a live source between a channel that has not seen an A/D vs a channel that runs through an A/D. Something gets lost going to digital.
C
Chibi Nappa
New member
There really isn't much of a choice anymore. I certainly can't afford analog tape and outboard gear. I do my EQ, levels, and summing on an analog board but the rest has to be digital. But I do try to actively avoid over-editing. I use the clunkiest editing interface possible (Roland 2480) to keep temptation at bay.
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
When I started recording digitally, it was on an AKAI DPS 12i. I had been been recording on a Tascam 488 for years prior to that {I know it's just a portastudio but it's analog and it's tape} and I was anticipating this harsh clinical representation of what I was now recording.
It didn't happen. Other than when the preamps are just too high and that awful digital clipping occurs, the sound of anything I record sounds like the Tascam but actually warmer, better. I accept that my ears aren't particularly developed to spot certain nuances.
This is, however an argument that will rage on into the night. Ultimately, you love who you love.
It didn't happen. Other than when the preamps are just too high and that awful digital clipping occurs, the sound of anything I record sounds like the Tascam but actually warmer, better. I accept that my ears aren't particularly developed to spot certain nuances.
This is, however an argument that will rage on into the night. Ultimately, you love who you love.
TeyshaBlue
It's the smell..
Something always gets lost when transduction takes place. It's that whole pesky 2nd law of Thermodynamics that gets you everytime.
Be it between mic and singer, signal and preamp, preamp and eq stip...there's loss and change all along the signal path.To say this is exclusive to digital conversion is kinda silly.
Lemme restate that for ya: Try the experiment yourself. Get on an analog board and A/B a live source between a channel that has not seen an A/D vs a channel that runs through an A/D. Something sounds different going to digital.
TeyshaBlue
It's the smell..
I have a soft spot for those old 488's. I owned 2 of em, the original and the MKII.
Workhorses that sounded suprisingly good. Amazing for a cassette based recorder.
D
dintymoore
Guest
I don't know really. All I heard was the sum total of it... whether the old Neumann's through the Neve into a good digital system would yield similar results I don't know. My friend's Dad paid $175K for that board in the 70's, i think it was an 8088. He recorded Santana, Sly and George Benson in there, and lots of Don Ho stuff.
Here's what I was thinking: analog makes what's right stick out, and digital makes what's wrong stick out.
It always amazed by how "perfect" everything has to be now. If I'm mixing and one trumpet is the slightest bit late or out of tune it really sticks out as bad. Analog seemed to be very forgiving.
If you listen to old Art Tatum recordings, in reality he was hitting clams left and right, but they didn't bark like they do on digital.
Here's some pics of that studio, I'm on the drums (terrible fiberglass lined set of Pearls I hated) in the lower right shot.
PDP
There once was a note
The good news is that supposedly there are some nice advances in convertors coming. For now I suffer with my crappy PCI card, but I think we're gonna see some good stuff using USB 3.0 and PCIe, especially for the guy who only has a few hundred here or there.
PDP
There once was a note
Great point.
themdla
New member
tl/dr
sorry i haven't read everyones comments and i'm sorry if someone mentioned this already.
i always figured that tape sounded "better" because analouge mediums have unlimited resolution.
with digital we have limited bit depths (16, 24, 32)
this applies to all digital mediums, tape, photograpy, film, etc...
this is one of the reasons that a film is still regarded better than digital for certain types of movies. nothing is truncated... information loss is the name of the game.
when you go digital the conversion process is an approximation of the original wave. the higher the bit depth, the more detailed the waveform captured.
this is one of the reasons you can hear an obvious difference between an 8-bit recording and a 16-bit one.
additionally try looking at the difference between a record and a cd, night and day.
these analouge mediums capture the waveform information in it's full resolution weather it be light or or any other type of electromagnetic energy.
in my opinion this is why a good film camera looks better than digital one.
sorry i haven't read everyones comments and i'm sorry if someone mentioned this already.
i always figured that tape sounded "better" because analouge mediums have unlimited resolution.
with digital we have limited bit depths (16, 24, 32)
this applies to all digital mediums, tape, photograpy, film, etc...
this is one of the reasons that a film is still regarded better than digital for certain types of movies. nothing is truncated... information loss is the name of the game.
when you go digital the conversion process is an approximation of the original wave. the higher the bit depth, the more detailed the waveform captured.
this is one of the reasons you can hear an obvious difference between an 8-bit recording and a 16-bit one.
additionally try looking at the difference between a record and a cd, night and day.
these analouge mediums capture the waveform information in it's full resolution weather it be light or or any other type of electromagnetic energy.
in my opinion this is why a good film camera looks better than digital one.
TeyshaBlue
It's the smell..
There's no such thing as "unlimited resolution".
Transduction guarantees that.
Transduction guarantees that.
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
But is all that inherent in the the medium or is that just us ? Have some of us gradually become perfectionist and less tolerant ?
PDP
There once was a note
I think it has something to do with the tape vrs digital. It seems like people using digital are always asking ways to smooth this or that, terms like gel, gloss etc always seem to be used. I thought it was just us amateurs but I think he has a point.
PDP
There once was a note
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
Probably 90% of what people hear as "differences" between analog and digital has almost nothing to do with the format difference.Yes, there are differences, but most of the time they are swamped by the differences in producer and engineer preferences over the years. The difference in sound between a 1975 release and a 2000 release are 90% because the goals of the producer and the mastering engineer are extremely different now than they were 35 years ago.
It's not that hard to get a digital recording to sound close enough to a 2" Studer to fool at least 50% of the ears judging it - especially if the upstream recording chain is similar. But when one is pushing the sub-bass up and compressing the crest factor down to 3dB and purposely making the RMS area of the mix mix as dense as possible and double and triple and quadruple all the vocals and rhythm instruments and all the rest of the things that people do nowadays in the name of providing "entertainment", things are going to sound different regardless of the medium.
It's true that many of those things are "allowed" by digital and not as easily possible in the old analog formats (e.g. you just can't push the sub bass in vinyl the way you can in WAV, just for one example), but it's not the formats themselves that make that difference happen, it's the choices of the humans operating them.
G.
It's not that hard to get a digital recording to sound close enough to a 2" Studer to fool at least 50% of the ears judging it - especially if the upstream recording chain is similar. But when one is pushing the sub-bass up and compressing the crest factor down to 3dB and purposely making the RMS area of the mix mix as dense as possible and double and triple and quadruple all the vocals and rhythm instruments and all the rest of the things that people do nowadays in the name of providing "entertainment", things are going to sound different regardless of the medium.
It's true that many of those things are "allowed" by digital and not as easily possible in the old analog formats (e.g. you just can't push the sub bass in vinyl the way you can in WAV, just for one example), but it's not the formats themselves that make that difference happen, it's the choices of the humans operating them.
G.
miroslav
Cosmic Cowboy
For me it's the fine precision editing of digital that makes all the difference. Like...why bother to de-ess globally when I can zoom in and simply adjust the very tail of a word and take out EXACLTY the amount of "ess" I want, and then on the next word, I can do something a bit different…or the ability to cross-fade with such fine precision that I can take a single sour note or vowel out of a phrase and drop one in from another location and you would never notice it.
For me...it's not so much about over-editing, but more about being able to save what are generally good takes that simply need to be touched up, and also the ability to remove stuff that should not be there, like the click of a tongue that ruins an otherwise great vocal phrase, or a loud fret squeak of a guitar string that just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the playing....etc...etc.
I think the limit to how much you edit is simply a personal choice for a given song,
Yeah...it can be addictive and almost endless if you get too caught up with it...but otherwise, for me THAT is what digital is all about...the ability to manipulate audio into how we feel it should sound. That’s what happens in the majority studio productions, and there is some editing and touching up of even the most “perfect” takes to some degree. The minute you turn a knob…you’re “editing” the original sound.
Farview
Well-known member
There is no such thing as unlimited resolution. Even film has a grain to it. The more grain the finer the detail.
The higher the bit depth, the more dynamic range you can capture and the less distortion there is at the zero crossing. 8 bit recordings sound like crap because they can only capture 48db of dynamic range. This is clearly not enough.
Apples and oranges. They go through a completely different mastering process due to the different limitations of the mediums. If you make a digital recording of a record, it still sounds like a record.
Then explain why cassette sounds different than 2 inch.
This picture is the source of a lot of misunderstanding about how digital audio works. It is correct in how each sample represents a specific point in the waveform. But that is not how the waveform gets reconstructed. It doesn't come out of the DA converter all stepped looking. It comes out the same way it went in. Get out an analog oscilloscope and test the wav going in and the wave coming out. They will look the same.
Most of the difference in the sound of different converters is the same sort of thing that makes different mic preamps sound different from each other...design and implementation.
Analog mediums have a tendancy to smoosh things together and bind them. Digital tends to be more stark and defined and doesn't magically blend things together.
Back when I was less zen about my productions, tape used to drive me insane. The sound you record on it doesn't come off of it sounding the same. I found myself compensating for what the tape would do and I hated it. The hiss drove me up a tree as well. The longer you worked on a tune, the worse it would sound because you would wear the tape out doing overdubs. If you knew you were going to do that, you would have to make a slave reel so you could wear that out doing overdubs and then transfer the good overdubs onto the original reel for mixing. So that meant that either your rhythm section was dull sounding or all your vocals, solos,etc... was second generation.
I don't miss it at all.
B
benage
New member
Just picking up on what Glen said, It seems to me alot of music is mastered 'brighter' these days with more top end, which some people may perceive as 'harsher' Im not saying the two formats are the same but this may be a factor.
Farview
Well-known member
There is also a lot of bias with the older folks who were around for the first generation of digital. Early CD's were harsh and brittle sounding for a few different reasons
1. Converters were really new and not very good. They were really only 12 bit converters.
2. Some of the high end in a mix would have to be attenuated with de-essers and the like to not overload the the cutting head when creating a vinyl record. They didn't do the same thing for the CD, so all the brightness was still there to annoy the senses...and mode worse by the crappy conversion.
3. The low end would have to be controlled with EQ and compression to work with vinyl. On CD, none of that would have to happen...so it didn't.
4-26. For vinyl, there was lots of other processing needed to fit the music on the record. That was the sound of music as everyone knew it. The selling point for digital was that you didn't have to do any of that to the mix, so they didn't. That left you with the raw mixes stuffed into crappy converters. Compared to the heavily massaged mixes that ended up on vinyl, they were thin, harsh and stark.
If you are introduced to something and it just sucks, that will be your impression of it. Every time you are faced with it again, you will be looking for that suckage.
I would surmise that the reason you can hear timing errors and tuning problems more on digital is because you can hear more detail because everything isn't softened and smoothed together.
Whether or not you think it sounds 'better' or not is subjective. If that is the sound you are going for, great. If it isn't, you're stuffed.
1. Converters were really new and not very good. They were really only 12 bit converters.
2. Some of the high end in a mix would have to be attenuated with de-essers and the like to not overload the the cutting head when creating a vinyl record. They didn't do the same thing for the CD, so all the brightness was still there to annoy the senses...and mode worse by the crappy conversion.
3. The low end would have to be controlled with EQ and compression to work with vinyl. On CD, none of that would have to happen...so it didn't.
4-26. For vinyl, there was lots of other processing needed to fit the music on the record. That was the sound of music as everyone knew it. The selling point for digital was that you didn't have to do any of that to the mix, so they didn't. That left you with the raw mixes stuffed into crappy converters. Compared to the heavily massaged mixes that ended up on vinyl, they were thin, harsh and stark.
If you are introduced to something and it just sucks, that will be your impression of it. Every time you are faced with it again, you will be looking for that suckage.
I would surmise that the reason you can hear timing errors and tuning problems more on digital is because you can hear more detail because everything isn't softened and smoothed together.
Whether or not you think it sounds 'better' or not is subjective. If that is the sound you are going for, great. If it isn't, you're stuffed.
B
benage
New member
I think it might also be that you like stuff the way your used to hearing it, modern CDs might seem bright and harsh to some but to me alot of old stuff just sounds muffled.