Analog recording...defeating the purpose?

A

alex0203

New member
Okay, well I really want to get back to my lo-fi sound.

Although this is probably a dumb question to some people on here....Since I'm recording with my 4-track cassette recorder, if I put all the songs on a cd, wouldn't that be defeating the whole purpose of recording via analog?


I hope I'm making sense and not confusing people. I guess my question is, what's the purpose of analog recording if you're eventually going to put all the songs on cd anyway?
 
Hey,

You could likely spark a lot of commentary about why you'd want to track on cassette in the first place, but not from me.

I record on 8 track cassette and mix straight to CD. I like the way that process works for the most part. CDs are convenient and durable and with a decent cd recorder, they capture the original tape sound pretty well.

From a purist perspective, you could mix down to tape and release everything on tape (some indie bands still do this), but not many people have the gear to listen to tapes anymore. A real purist is unlikely to chose cassette as their primary medium though.

So, I think it is fine and doesn't defeat the purpose as you're still capturing the tape sound during the whole tracking process and that will translate pretty well to CD. You will then have your music in a format that is much more convenient and accessible to others.
 
CDAudio is a delivery format. It's made to capture what's put to it reasonably faithfully. It's not going to magically change a "lo-fi" recording to a "hi-fi" recording.

Sure - It should be a high-fidelity (faithful to the source) copy of the original recording - but it's going to sound like the original recording.

Side-note in case anybody doesn't understand this:

One of the last DSD projects I received was a terrible, horrible sounding recording. I mean, it was BAD.

DSD is arguably the pinnacle of digital recording - I've not heard better fidelity. It's as 'pristine and perfect' as one could expect.

And of course, the client was under the impression that dumping his horrible sounding recording to DSD would make it 'pristine and perfect' sounding. While all it did was create a pristine and perfect copy of his horrible sounding recording.

Under ideal conditions, digital gives you what you gave it.
 
When I first started recording on an 8 track portastudio, my intention was to eventually transfer the finished stuff onto a vinyl record. I dreamed of the cover art of a baby in the womb.This was in '92. I didn't even own a CD player till the following year.
But someone told me that it wouldn't sound good on vinyl and after much thought over many months, decided to go for a CD transfer. It didn't magically transfer it into the evil artifact ! In those days, I would take it to a place where they did the transfer (I put it on DAT) and the first time, the guy says to me "Do you want me to compress it ?" - I didn't know what the heck he meant !!
ZUBA ! ZUBA ! :D

Put it onto CD. It's the way of the world. :)
 
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