Evangelizing, eh?
C'mon Beck, my man, let's be honest here. That is *exactly* what you spend 90% of your time on this BBS doing. I'm not trying to claim that in and of itself is a bad thing; I've come to you for advice in the past because I respect your knowledge and experinece in things analog, and you have been very helpful, and I have been very appreciative.
But whether you realize it of not - and I suspect that inside you do - you do present yourself to others as one who is on the front line of preaching the analog gospel with the desire and goal to see it regain it's place as unquestioned king of the mountain. I have only rarely seen you on this BBS outside of the analog forum, and those times that you are (like now) it's been strictly to either advocate analog, bash digital, or both.
Of all the issues in recording, nothing is as religious in nature as the so-called “Digital Revolution” and the misconceptions that perpetuate it.
Except those with equal fervor on the other side if the analog/digital religious war as well.
And I don't appreciate you lumping me in with the mis- or poorly-informed zealots on either side of that idiotic war. I am on record several times over as saying neither one is intrinsically "better" overall than the other, and for either side to claim so is just silly.
I'm tired of Evangelical Republicans branding me as a liberal Democrat at the same time that San Francisco Democrats brand me as too conservative for my own good, let alone the common good, and I'm not going to accept you lumping me in with the extremists in the "digital revolution" just because I recognize that the Emperor called Analog isn't wearing quite as many layers of clothes as you and your friends would like me to believe. I thought the "if your not with us, your against us" mentality died with Bushes credibility a few years ago.
In fact your idea applies to the gullibility of many members on these forums in accepting any and all digital mythology.
I agree with that. The Internet is filled with self-perpetuating myths and wikialities on the digital side. The same is true of analog. Mythology and religious fervor play no favorites on this issue.
I’m a genealogist, an ardent skeptic with a degree in social science. My sources are well researched. My survey methods are sound… my standards high, and my background in recording goes back nearly 30 years and to the present in all areas relating to sound recording, not simply analog/digital issues.
I don't want to turn this into a dick waving contest, beck, but I also have been at this since 1979, working both the analog and digital sides on the amateur and pro levels in audio, video and product development. Add to that honors degrees in computer science with minors in information science and physics, with a couple of semesters of electronics engineering thrown in for good measure.
We've both been around the block more than a few times, so let's stop waving our dicks at each other, and try and keep the debate on topic, shall we?
What’s’ happening is that you and a couple others are trying to converse using freshmen level understanding… that is very clear. At that level it is all very blue-sky marketing brochure stuff. And for that reason perhaps I shouldn’t try to engage you at the graduate level. You seem to be completely unaware of issues that are regularly discussed in professional circles..
Ummm, now that you have seen that your dick is no bigger than mine, you might want to reconsider that.
30 (well, OK, 29) years ago, when I built my first analog home studio (with homebrew digital control, though that had nothing to do with the sound itself), my day job was in sales and marketing of things audio and video. I left sales and marketing within 3 years and vowed never to return because I hate the total bullshit surrounding those fields. If you strayed out of the analog forum once in a while you'd know my utter disdain for marketing tactics and their total raping of the truth, for once again I am on record on these forums more times than I can count fighting against such bullshit. The whole studio in a box promise that you can buy this software tonight and sound like a rock star tomorrow expectation that are set nowdays are a big part of the problem for which this thread was originally started.
My grasp of digital recording goes to the very core and is as up to date and forward-looking as Tomorrow's concepts. You don’t recognize my terminology, nor can you engage in a technical discussion, but that’s because you haven’t arrived, not because I don’t understand. It is the digital lemmings that are out of the loop.
Well, so far in this thread you have piled up the uninformed bullshit deeper than a 2" tape. To wit:
- that the physical interleave format of digital WAV and CDA files somehow corrupts the original stereo image encoded into that file. False. I have explained this is NO UNCERTAIN TERMS earlier in this thread; there is no way in this universe that the structure of the file could possibly have anything whatsoever to do with that. If you spent some four years as an engineer in audio software product development actually diving inside of the file formats and pulling out their guts the way that I have, you might understand with the certainty that I have.
- that the Nyquist theorum is all about minimum sample rate to avoid aliasing. False. Nyquist only peripherally even had audio in mind when he developed his theorum, and aliasing was little more than a complication or sidebar to be addressed and answered by the theorum. The whole purpose of Nyquist had to do with information theory in general and the ability to communicate analog information digitally. The Nyquist frequency is best definied as the minimum sample rate frequency required to be able to
losslessly reconstruct an analog signal of limited bandwidth from the digital samples. Whether this was/is applied to audio, television signal transmission, telephoninc facimilie transmisison, digital multiplexing, or any other specific form of communication is simply use of the theorum after the fact in actual application, and not the one vertical application that Nyquist was specifically concerned with when he designed his theorum. And the idea of any aliasing issues is just one factor to be considered that the Theorum had to handle properly in order to work, not the main thesis or target of the theorum.
There are maybe 50 people on the entire Internet who honestly claim to know exactly the Nyquist Theorum in and out (I do not claim to be one of them). Of those 50, 40 are either erroneous or lying. But of those 40, 100% try to make it out as being much simpler than it actually is.
- That digital conversion, in and of itself, causes an unnatural corruption of
the stereophonic field any worse than analog does. Even more so, that this is factual "common knowledge" amongest any engineer with any experience. I gotta tell ya, Beck, in all my years working in both analog and digital (yes I work and have worked both sides of the fence also), the only place I have ever heard that at all is amongst the more zealous of the analophiles on the Internet. I have worked with broadcast engineers and lifelong members of the AES, people who have analog coursing through teir veins, but who are realists all the same, who when they hear stuff like that just shudder and shake their heads in disgust.
Stereophony is encoded in the method of capture and in the playback setup. The only way outside of that the field image can be fucked with is by playing with delays and phase relationships between the two channels. Even then, the actions necessary to artifically collapse the field would have to be specific to that collapse effect; i.e. the delays and phase interrelations would have to be of a nature where they specifically pushed the field inward.
To say that by it's inherent nature, that the digital encoding process itself can and regularly does do that is ludicrous. If, IF such an effect were happening, it would have to be almost entirely attributable to some other factor than the theoretical process itself. It most CERTAINLY has zero to do with digital stereo storage formats as you offered earlier.
I alread went in some detail on other possible influence that acn fuck with the stereo image in digital, but all of those are attributable to bad mechanical implementation, not to the digital process istelf, and are all correctable. But here's another couple of posibilities to consider (I'm not saying they are true, necessarily, but they are potential variables to consider):
- The percentage of engineeers/CRs using nearfield monitoring exclusively vs. those that use partial or complete use of room-address (far-field) loudspeakers is greater in the digital realm than in the analog realm. Even with diffusion and absorption acoutics, CRs are not anechoic chambers, they do play a part in the overall imaging. The use of far field monitoring does allow the image to "mature" better than nearfields do. "Old school" engineers in "old school" CRs are mre apt to be exposed to this than those running strictly a PT rig on nearfields.
- As I demonstrated earlier in the thread, there is nothing "natural" about a stereophonic image to begin with, regardless of whether it's recorded with analog, digital or smoke signal. Any perceived "wider" image in analog is not relly going to be any closer to the truth than digital will. You will most likely repond to that by saying something along the lines of, "but it DOES sound better". Which leads right into th next point...
I prefer analog, but that’s because I also use digital…. a fact you appear to be deliberately ignoring.
No more or less than you are ignoring the fact that I too am "bi" (
), and yet I play no favorites. I use the best tool for the job, and I don't find analog to always be the best tool or even the best sound. For example:
- Tell me to produce Yo Yo Ma, and I'll definitely want to lean analog.
- Tell me to produce Moby, and I'll definitely want to lean digital.
- Tell me to produce James Brown and I won't give a shit which bottle I use to catch the lightning, as long as it has a cap on it
.
What I notice most is that you admit that you "prefer analog". And there's nothing wrong with that. I don't prefer either, or maybe better, my preference are context-based, not absolute. I see nothing wrong with that either. That doesn't make either one of us right or wrong. That just demonstrates a bias difference (and not the same one you accuse me of, either.)
I know very few analog fans that haven’t made a true choice when looking at analog and digital solutions. In contrast, most digital users, especially at this level, have made no choice at all because they don’t know anything about analog.
Don't lump me in with them. I've been analog since the days of the Tascam 144, the TEAC A3340 and
the Pioneer RT1020L. I also have experience using Otari, Sony, Studer and Studer/Revox (yes, the days of both names on one machine) analog open reel machines in formats from mono to 16 track. I've more than tasted the analog koolaid, and I quite like it. Just don't ask me to put arsenic in that koolaid and drink it along with you, any more than you would expect me to do the same with the digital flavored koolaid.
You’re repeating what I’ve heard over and over in brochures, mags and web forums for years.
Do you still believe after this post - if you have made it this far
- that what I am saying to you and what you are hearing from me are the same thing?
Of course there will be misunderstandings and disagreement, but you’re obviously getting frustrated and I might add, you went personal, ugly and began shedding more heat than light on the subject very early in the thread. I've heard tell of this behavior of yours from other members, but never experienced it until this thread.
Yeah, I know exactly who you probably heard it from, too. Forums are a great place to make inadvertant enemies of people who can't stand the heat of debate. I don't have time to worry about them, life is too short.
What I find facinating, beck, is that you accuse me of the very behavior you are exhibiting. You were tossing heat back and forth with terra mortim long before you got into it with me (BTW, terra is one of those that got pissed at me within two days of his joining the board, and I have to my knowledge never recovered
. What can I say, ya can't make everyone happy all the time.)
We both claim to be fighting off the myth dragons, the problem is, we have differing views of just who the dragon is. You see digital as the dragon, ad I see zealotry and disinformation one way or the other as being the dragon.
This thread alone... even just the title would be a threat to you whether I had chimed in or not.
This I don't get. This thread had and has, except for your contributions, nothing to do with analog vs. digital. It had/has everything to do with expectations of home recording. Even all-digital pro productions on average are of higher quality than amateur recordings. NOTE I said "on average"; there are always exceptions. Nevertheless, any analog vs. digital debate is low on any list of reasons for an expectations let down regarding this topic. But as to how it's just about all you ever talk about, God forbid those that are not with you, fore they therefore must be against you.
G.
), but just a couple of small things...