I wouldn't go so far as to say that computer-based signal processing is a fad, but I do think that "digital convergence" has natural limits, and that the same reaction to digital that has re-introduced tubes and vinyl to a new generation of musicians and listeners will insure that outboard professional audio hardware will continue to have a place and to rise in value, as it has for the past decade. Consider the number of outstanding microphone preamps and combination processors that are available today, priced in the $1,000 to $3,500 range. How does that number compare even to ten or fifteen years ago?
Today, high-end playback systems (the things that take digital recordings and turn them back into analog sounds) are at least five times as costly as ten years ago. In 1990, a pair of speakers that cost $4,000 were considered by many to be extravagant. Today, that's about the median range for high-end speakers, and there are speaker systems trading hands for up to $225,000. These are home systems, mind you, not commercial installations. People with money apparently are willing to pay a great deal to make their music sound "real."
Real musical instruments (acoustic, "natural" instruments) have also risen in value, just as live performances continue to command ever-higher ticket prices. Not all of this is attributable to inflation. All of these phenomena are suggestive of a love of music and music-making that will never be satisfied with "samples" and "effects," not that there won't be a place for them.
I think the most legitimate promise of digital will take the form not of processing and sound creation but of a breakthrough in resolution; ironically, those who have the capability at this time of recording with bit-depths of 24 or more and sampling rates of 192kHz claim that they are beginning to achieve a "naturalness" that approaches high-quality two-inch analog tape recordings.
While no mass consumer playback system currently offers music in 24/192 formats, when such a level hits the street at an everyman price, I predict that the sound we have come to accept from our compact discs, cassette tapes, minidiscs and DATs will sound as archaic and artificial to us as an early 1950s 78-rpm hi-fi or a wax-cylinder Edison recording sounds to us today. We'll simply wonder how *anyone* could have ever thought they sounded realistic.
If you doubt this, go back and listen to recordings from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. Are your ears fooled into thinking there is a real chorus backing up the singer? That those "trumpets" or "drums" were actual instruments being played by human beings in a hall or recording studio? I don't think so. At best, we enjoy them because their artificiality expressed something about the sense of alienation we felt in other areas of our lives.
We are complex creatures of flesh and blood and bone, all of which affect how we create and hear sounds, especially music. There is much we can (or soon will be able to) do in the digital domain to bring a more natural sound to recordings. But outboard components -- microphones, hardware preamps and processors -- like musical instruments played by real people, will likely become even more prized as recording becomes more computer-based.
What, then, is the key point of convergence? Where should the emerging digital recordist put the bulk of his investment in the new technology?
I think the Rosetta stone of the next level of quality in sound reproduction -- the future collector's item from the age of the digital revolution -- will be the A/D converter. Computers will come and go (mostly go), canned effects will quickly become outdated, virtual tracks and DSP tricks will expand exponentially ad nauseum -- but that most precious and elusive quality of musicality will be affected most by your choice of analog-to-digital converter.
Hardware's here to stay. At least that's my opinon today.
With kind regards,
Mark H.
The reason for one big LCD is so that you have lots of info right in your face, no digging around in menus trying to find stuff in a rush. First of all I want to see meters, current eq settings, effects with their settings, waveform or rta(switchable), for every channel.
