analog signal processing within digital recording

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camus

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Hello there, I'm a bit of a newbie at digital recording so please spare me the flames! Basically I come from a 1/2 inch analog 8-track background, but I've been thinking of crossing over to digital lately. Prob is, I don't really like the sound of digital compression, EQ, reverb and all (it's purely personal taste!), besides I've built up quite a nice cache of analog outboard effects and I don't want to waste em. Is it possible to send aux/insert sends from yer soundcard back to the board for mixing in outboard effects, and will this constant A/D to D/A conversion degrade your signals too badly? Thinking of getting a Layla 24 soundcard, is that any good? Thanks for yer time and patience, fellas.
 
* The Layla 24 is a pretty good card.

* The extra D/A and A/D converstions to send things from the hard drive to the outboard stuff and back will degrade the sound to a degree. You'd have to determine for yourself whether or not the loss is acceptable to you. I'd certainly limit the number of trips in and out of the digital realm, but I could probably accept one extra pass through the converters on occasion. If you're confident with setting the parameters on your gear, you might be brave enough to just record the signal wet... I usually don't have the balls to commit like that (and I don't mind some of the digital stuff out there).
 
Go for it!

I would never use a digital mixer or digital eq's or digital compressor/limiters if it was between that and using decent analog gear. Using some type of analog interface after recording tracks on digital is the key for achieving nice warm, ear friendly tones on your tracks. Digital processing just doesn't quite cut it to my ears, even if it is cheaper, "supposedly" is higher quality (of course, the highest quality is what sounds best to your ears...:)), and easier to use and automate.

Digital processing DOES degrade the audio! Go to http://www.digido.com and read up on DSP there for more explaination on this.

If you only need 8 tracks of audio, then you will have a great setup there. If you need more tracks though, you will need another Layla card.

Don't jump on the digital mixer/processing deal just because everyone else is doing it. If it don't sound as good to your ears as analog mixing and processing does, then it don't! I prefer analog mixing and processing myself. If I have to loss a bit of that "digital pureness" to have analog mixing and processing, well then I guess I am willing to have "degraded" sounding audio! But, I don't really think you are lossing anything at all.

You can use your cards 8 outputs to run to 8 tracks on your mixer. Use you outboard processors, then use 2 of your soundcards inputs to record the finale stereo recording back to the hard drive. More or less, that is what you are using ADAT's and a analog mixer to a DAT. I use ADAT's, and people don't seem to mind how my mixes sound. All the "pure" digital sound I am lossing out on doesn't seem to be making people say "Wow, that sounds like he used a analog mixer and he lost a lot of quality in the recording because of that"!

If anything, some of the worst sounding digital recordings I have heard were done with software mixing and low end (minus $10k) digital mixers! I have heard some decent mixes done with digital DSP, but mostly, DSP to my ears seems to lack a certain something that makes the mix ear friendly. Sort of a stale sound. Analog mixing and processing seems to add a sort of cohesiveness to the sound, and give the mixes more tone and color.

I surely hope to have analog mastering gear someday too! While the Wavelab with the high dollar plugin route works pretty well, I would still like to have the color and charm that high dollar analog eq's and comp/limiters provide.

Good luck.

Ed
 
Let me just add that there are cards were you can loop them back into the interface with out going through a mixer.
I'm not sure about the Layla.

Expect also a degree of latency when using outboard gear with a interface.
 
Thanks for the replies fellas. Sonusman, didn't quite get what you were saying. What do you mean by saying that the Layla 24 only gets you 8 tracks of audio? I thought it had only 8 Inputs/Outputs but you could record an "unlimited" number of audio tracks on your DAW, and mix them internally? Unless you're you're talking bout outputting the digital tracks and doing the final mix with an analog board, in which case I totally agree. I tried a copy of my friend's Cakewalk and I just couldn't mix anything with a bloody mouse! Too darn unintuitive and fiddly in my opinion. The only solution I can think of (besides getting another card for 16 trks :)) is to do submixes internally and "digitally bounce" so you can do your final mix in 8 track. Is bouncing tracks in the digital domain considered a DSP function? If I keep it all in 24 bit I won't have to bother with dither will I? Thanks for the help!
 
You should be able to use the Layla's outputs to the effects and return to another input on the Layla.
 
as far as being limited to 8(x) tracks

you could assign any number of tracks to any particular output on any particular soundcard from any particular software. (hope that makes sense) so you could submix however many tracks into eight busses, go into the board, and back into the sound card (or DAT or tape or external burner) If you think through the mixes, and assign them creatively, you could definitly get a workable mix setup. If I had some good outboard gear, and a soundcard with lots of out's I would defintly go for something like that, especially if I had 1/2" tape to mix to! As far as software to do this I think Vegas would work very well, cuz it is so easy to set up busses (and generally easy to work in all respects)

-jhe
 
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