analog
I am 26. I use a tascam 38 reel to reel because my friends and i started making 4 track recordings on cassettes when we were about 17ish. When we started hearing other peoples digital recordings from studios around town, we always thought they sounded thin and impersonal, which was probably due more to the fact that it was a long time ago for digital, and also recording studios suck most times at giving you a unique sound. So for me there was really never a need or desire to get a digital setup. Firstly, i dont care what other people are doing, and secondly i was more impressed with the sound of my friends cassette portastudio recordings. Did they sound professional? No. But they had more character and to this day are less easily pegged as being any one obvious era of sound or production standards. For me neglecting to move to digital was a matter not of being "retro" or stuck in my ways, it was because i believed where i already was was more than enough, and still full of creative potential.
Whats strange is that the other day some 18 year old guy i met who is in some modern junk band was blown away that i used analog and started saying "yeah it just sounds better" and all this stuff, even though he never used even cassettes. Its a mindblow to realize that most young people start these days on a computer or a digital stand alone. Not that thats bad, im just saying its weird how these kids are hearing from somewhere that analog is "better", never having had used it themselves. It must be guitar player magazine articles and band interviews they are reading.
But anyways...