I really should know better than to post on this thread in this group, but hey, it's late and I'm tired, so I'll share a few thoughts.
As someone who has been recording almost exclusively with analog gear for about 23 years, much of that time with the same generation of 3M gear Tom Scholz loves so well, I would still have to say that, from my point of view (and probably no one else's around here, which is cool), this thread is kind of off the mark, though I'm sure it's reassuring to most of the folks who hang out some on this group.
Personally, I find my DAW way more musically productive for composition and I understand both the analog and digital side well enough and pretty much avoid doing anything really stupid, which is really crucial. I really like the recordings I make on my 3M decks, and I really like the recordings I make on the DAW, and I also like starting a few tracks on the 3M and porting over to the DAW to do more tracks and mix. Plus, more tracks on the DAW means I can do a lot more true stereo tracking, which is very useful musically in the way I record.
Now, my M-56 was pretty cool because things sounded better coming out than going in, and the same is surprisingly still true of the M-79s, too. But let's not forget what the signal goes through inside a tape machine. In my case, it goes through a big ol' pair of UTC transformers, one on the way in and then one on the way out, too. I think that iron is a big part of the sound of the older machines like 3M and Ampex and the early MCIs. Now the record side of things is pretty darn linear and the magnetization of the tape is pretty well controlled and the gap is pretty small. Playback, on the other hand, is tough. The geometry is harder to perfect. There's some nonlinearities in there. Also, the 3Ms were the first to really knock down the annoying scrape flutter up in the audio band, but the later Studer machines and the ATR series did just as well. But still there is some wow and flutter in the subaudio band and in the audio band. Then of course, there is nonlinearity as the magnetization level starts to get up towards the high end of the curve. That's what gives us that nice compression and a mild reduction in peak to RMS ratio. You can add processing, but digital recording itself should be and generally is very linear by comparison, at least w.r.t. flutter of all varieties and level response. Now, in the case of the M-56, it had some pretty darn mature analog technology inside with all the old discrete class A electronics running on +/- 28V rails, but the M-79s are filled with the much loathed "741" opamp chips and I still think they sound amazing. Go figure!
OK, these familiar artifacts of tape are useful tools in recording and sound just fine. If you track to digital, you won't have these characteristics by default and the recording techniques must adapt. One critical failure of a lot of newbies is that they don't really understand analog audio very well, and without that understanding, you can't really understand digital very well nor make a really high quality recording. Analog is much more intuitive. One of the advantages of analog gear is that every channel tends to have a useful SVI (VU) style meter that is musically useful. Newbies tend to start with digital and think in terms of peaks, peak meters and dBFS. That doesn't have much to do with musical level practices. The intuitive thing about analog (at least in the USA) is the notion of 0 VU based upon a meter with a 300 msec time constant. With digital, you should still meter with something that has a VU-like relation to the music. As far as the peaks and levels go, you should simply set a conservative reference level to make sure you are nowhere near the peak of 0 dBFS and otherwise forget about the whole idea and stick with analog level practices and metering (again, IMHO).
But getting back to the big picture, I think there are more important things going on than anything relating to inherent analog and digital sonic differences, per se.
I think a useful analogy is how we currently relate, as a modern society, to food and drink and why we have epidemics of obesity, diabetes and related illnesses. As ELP said in a darn good song, "you and I are yesterday's answers..." Our current physiology is the answer to the past, say a couple hundred thousand years ago, and is out of sync with our technology. We are victims of our own advertising, clearly, but what causes this? Our dietary responses are based upon a situation where access to salt, sugar and fat is sporadic and limited, at best. But, due to our current technology and use of resources, many folk have easy access to those three at every meal. Only knowledge and a determined act of will can lead to healthy eating habits in that environment. It requires purposely going against the grain of common dietary practice, perhaps in much the same way we analog recordists go against the grain of common digital audio practice. But that same knowledge and act of will is possible within digital audio practice.
The digital technology presents the same kind of danger that our easily available food does. Back when processing was expensive, difficult and required expertise, its use was appropriately restrained and most tracks were pretty authentic. Most everyone, even folk who aren't insane like me about this stuff, intuitively have a meter for authenticity. A lot of people's meters are reading low these days and that's where a lot of this dissatisfaction comes from. But, IMHO, it comes first from soul-less, uncreative, crappy music put together by cut and paste and not from practicing till you can actually play the song with skill and emotion. It also comes from a pretty caustic music business environment that selects for homogeneity and lowest common denominator. In the actual audio realm, it comes first from across the board abuses of digital technology, such as abysmal level practices, overuse of compression and all kinds of other processing with no real understanding of what that does or what good, clean tracks ought to sound like. The actual differences resulting from innate limitations in the digital process are, in my opinion, second or by this stage perhaps even third order effects of much less importance. As I said in the beginning, with the current evolution of 24-bit digital tracks and the proper use of dither at the end of the process, its quite possible to do excellent sounding recordings that communicate the music, art and emotion as well as any mere electronic medium can communicate something as complex and rich as a real, musical experience. However, the temptations are so great that it takes a lot of knowledge (including a firm knowledge of analog audio practices) and an act of will to get there.
Whew! All right folks, flame on, but don't expect me to fight anyone on this topic... I know that opinions can run strong on this issue, and you all don't need to be "set straight" by anyone nor does anyone need to agree with me in the slightest on this. We will all continue to make the best music and recordings we can, however we do that, and I will still be rolling tape from time to time along with spewing those bits.
Cheers,
Otto
