Very funny, Tim G. Sarcasm can be fun... I certainly enjoy it on occasion.
Something really important here is that there are in fact sounds in a live concert that can be unpleasant to the ear. A good bit of my recording career (at least half) was spent recording classically trained musicians/singers in well-designed music halls. So yeah, I understand the complexities of capturing the magic. I've heard some gawdawful frequencies in live performances that you really want to get rid of in the sweetening phase unless you're a masochist.
I don’t want to hijack this thread though, so what I mean by, “Better than live” is best left for another thread.
PS: It’s helpful to ask for clarification so you don’t spend precious time and wordage launching into irrelevant tirades.
Tim, I quite agree with your point that certain live performances can have a harshness to them which can be tamed with careful post production processing. To me this is so self evident it hardly needs mentioning.
We did actually discuss this point in a thread some time ago so what you say here is not surprising or new.
Your argument then was far more specific than the
general value of post production sweetening. I think you were suggesting that recording to tape initially, was the way to go because of tape's ability to sweeten almost automatically, "on the fly".
While I agree, yet again, that tape can in some circumstances add a nice quality, there are two bigger problems.
One is that trying to sweeten "on the fly" while making the actual live recording is risky business. You dont get a second chance. You cant "unsweeten" if you mess up.
The other is that tape does more than one thing when it starts to overload. Not only does it add more harmonic distortion products than below that, it amplitude compresses. The two phenomena are locked together and you cant have one without the other.
That makes it a very inflexible way to sweeten especially in a live recording situation. Compare that to your oft described preference to rerecord your CD's to tape. There you always have the original recording on hand. If you over or undercook your analog tape sweetening at least you can always go back and do it again. Not so when the tape sweetening is locked together with the original live recording take.
Anyway, all this is a digression from the thread which was about recording 90khz to vinyl.
I must check vinyl's ability to handle up to 90khz the next time I drag out my Neumann and Scully cutting lathes and bounce off a few metal masters one sunny afternoon...
The point being none of us has access to such specialised equipment or the advanced audio production skills and techniques used to make a well mastered vinyl production.
Mastering to vinyl is where the term mastering came from. We take it for granted that vinyl sounded as good as it did because we also took for granted the exotic mastering techniques used by guys like Grundman and Sax to squeeze out of the process the very best sound without overloading the medium.
For these guys to get a clean cut in just the audible frequency range, say out to 18khz, was a minor miracle, especially on the inner grooves.
To expect that vinyl disc cutting could cope with 90khz or anything close to it is to have no idea of the physical limitations that mastering engineers were already struggling with in the audible range, let alone supersonics.
If 90khz was practically achieveable, why then did one of the 70's Quadraphonic systems use a carrier frequency for the rear channels of only 30khz? And even with such a low frequency, why did they still require the consumer to use a special elliptical stylus just to successfully play it. And on top of that, why with all that care did the record steeply deteriorate into distortion after a short number of playings? And a related question: why did Quadraphonic die a very quick death?
Compare today where 5 or 6 channel surround sound,
coupled with high quality home video has been around for years and no one even blinks.
Even if you are a supersonics devotee requiring 90khz bandwidth ( I'm definitely not) vinyl records are about the last on the list of viable media a knowledgeable person would even consider. It would put impossible stresses on the purely mechanical system that disc cutting and reproducing involves.
Analog tape would itself struggle but it would be much better than vinyl, I'm pretty sure.
You'd probably need to go to an FM modulated tape system similar to the what VCR's use to try and capture the incredible range of frequencies they had to deal with in recording the picture information of broacast TV.
In short, if you're into supersonics, for a workable system, forget straight analog.
FWIW
