Tunes68 said:
Okay, so this means that since good analog equipment is no longer available to the average consumer, we are doomed to deal with digital sound from now on, and that it will never be able to sound as good as the high end analog equipment that studios used to use?
No longer?
Good analog equipment has ALWAYS been priced out of the range of the average consumer. As far as sounding as good as recordings in high end studios, that comes from three things, and the gear is by far the least important of them. The other two are the spaces in most great studios, and the skills of the engineers who get used in high end studios (and the guy with the ears, as I have already said, is by FAR the most important part of the technical equation).
Tunes68 said:
High end studio equipment is one thing, but how about the digital home recording equipment that is available to the average home recording enthusiast, like me? I own and use a Fostex VF160 16 track hard disc recorder. So what you guys are saying is that my VF160 will never be able to touch the quality of recording that say a Tascam 24 track analog reel to reel can? Not even by tweaking the sound of it on a computer?
If so, that's pretty sad, and it doesn't say much for how far our recording technology has come since the '60s and '70s. I realize that magnetic recording tape is a different format of recording than digital, but I didn't realize the difference was that much. As I said earlier, to my ears, my recordings on my VF160 sound superb, but I guess I'll have to hear some old analog recordings from the '70s and my own recordings to see how much of a difference there is.
Tunes68.
Actually, your VF 16 probably DOES sound better than most, if not all, Tascam 24 tracks. It does NOT, however, sound as good as an Otari or Studer 2" 24 track. That is my whole point; with analog gear, the quality of the gear makes a HUGE difference. A much bigger difference than with digital gear.
As far as how far recording technology has come, you are missing a big part of the equation. Recording technology since the 80's and 90's has not made anything even close to a linear progression. You have two distinctly different paths. On one path, you have analog tape, a technology which has been around (and which has been improving) since the 1940's. Longer really, but the quality of wire recordings was so bad that I seen no reason not to discount it. Before tape, you either cut direct to disc (lacquer or shellac, not CD) or you recorded optically to film. Your second path is digital sound, which has really only been around as a commercial product since the late 70's. You are talking about a technology which is close to 70 years old, and then you are comparing it to a technology which is less than 30. Of course analog still sounds better. It has had 40 extra years of research. It is not like you can really use all of the research in analog recording when trying to make digital sound better. They have vastly different issues. With analog, the struggle was always to improve the signal to noise ratio while keeping THD as low as possible. Those are not issues with digital, at all. With any digital device, s/n ratio and THD is a strictly mathematical expression of the bit depth. Digital has other problems, the solutions for which are still being found. It will get there, but it hasn't yet.
But if you look at my first post in this thread, you will note that I am using digital these days myself, even though I much prefer the sound of analog. Why? Because passable analog is not cheap, and great analog is horribly expensive.
Light
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