Analog vs Digital:
Recording on tape and recording on hard drive are two very different skills.
I started recording on reel tapes and held off moving to digital because the first of the digital was expensive and I didn’t care for it as much. But these days, give me digital any day.
Analog was far more expensive and less stable then digital. I’ve got ten analog reels from the 1980’s that have “the stick”. The coating on the mylar tape is breaking down and they can not be played unless you bake the tapes at 130f for several hours (which is an entirely different post all together -one suited for the pit).
Today, for the money, you can fit far more music on a hard drive then a tape. Reel tapes came in 2500 foot reels. The tapes ran at 15 to 30 inches per second. I don’t feel like doing the math to get an absolute time, but a ½ inch 8- track reel running 15 inches per second would hold about 4-5 songs. The ½ reel costs around 50-60 US dollars (2 inch, 32 track reels are around 200 dollars). Common digital recording uses about five megabytes a minute (10 meg a minute for stereo). 5 average length songs (4 minutes) with 8 tracks use about 800MB -but it’s less then that.
The difference in recording in digital vs analog -it’s non-linear. You don’t waste space. If you have a vocal track that only has an overall time of one minute, you aren’t recording those other three minutes. You’ve only used one minute worth of space for that track. So in reality, my example above is perhaps closer to 400-500 MB depending on what you’re recording.
In any case, I just bought a 120 gigabyte hard drive for $120 USD and I’ll be able to record several albums worth of music on it.
There is no way to copy my music from one reel to another reel without losing some quality. By the 7th or 8th generation it’s sounding pretty bad. In digital, I make several copies of the masters and I’m set. I could make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy all day long and the first copy would sound like the three thousandth copy. In the case of my “sticky” circa 1980’s reels, the only option of saving the music is to bake the tapes and pull all the tracks into the digital domain.
The beauty of digital is “what you put in is what you get out”. Analog wasn’t like that. You had to learn the limitations of your media, the machines, etc. I always used Grandmater 456 reel tapes because I knew what they sounded like. It’s kind of silly to think about what a blank tape sounds like when you stop and think about it. But I knew how something was going to sound once it was on the tape and I knew if I needed to push something a bit harder or louder so it records better on the tape.
So, if you ask me, in a pure recording sense, digital is far better then analog.
CD vs Vinyl:
There have been a fair amount of bad analog to digital remastering done over the years. Many of the first CDs released sounded like crap because the studio engineers were used to working with digital. Also, if it was a reissue, many engineers mastered the CD’s to sound like the master tapes -what was REALLY recorded. The catch was, people were used to hearing the vinyl or cassette reproduction. This resulted in people saying the CD’s sounded “brittle” or “tinny”. In many cases, they just weren’t used to hearing all the high end of what was actually recorded.
Vinyl itself has a number of flaws. Theoretically the average frequency range of the record is quite good (7 Hz-27 kHz) but because of the way the phono needle reproduces the sounds you have to limit some frequencies in your mix if you want the record to work right.
If you created a mix with very low end sounds, that side of the record would be very short -about 5 minutes. This is due to the lower sounds take up more physical space when the record is cut.
Treble also has a problem. If you created a mix with very high highs, you’d end up with transients when you played the record back from the needle wagging back and forth very quickly.
There are also variations between the start of the record and the tail end. The curvature on the inside doesn’t reproduce the high end as well as the outer edge of the record. This is why many records have the loudest music first and the softer “love songs” as the last track.
There is no absolute time on a LP record. It all depends on the mix. More bass equals less overall time because it requires a wider groove. Many engineers had to fit X amount of songs on to one side of a record so to do that they could cut the low end.
On a record, one side of the groove is the left channel, the other the right. Due to how the needle reproduces the sounds, the engineer has limitations on how he can mix elements in the music. Extreme mixes with a loud snare on the left channel, a bass and sharp hi-hat on the right, and some wacky out of phase stereo vocals would wreck havoc during playback.
(Off subject, an old friend had a box of record test cuts of KISS and other bands he worked with back in the day. It was kind of fun to play them back and hear the different mixes they tried. Some had so much treble it distorted on playback while others just sounded like warm goo.)
If you ever get a chance to compare a master tape recording to a record, you’ll notice the difference in how the vinyl reproduces the frequencies. It really is amazing how different the two sound.
With CD’s, you have no limitations. You will always have at least 74 minutes of time. You can arrange the track in whatever order you want. Crank the bass, have treble that rips holes in eardrums, mix anyway you want, it doesn’t matter. The format will take anything you feed it.
You can hear this new freedom in recordings being released today. As the older engineers (with their old rule books) are moving out of the studio, the new guys are coming in and really pushing the limits of mixing. Some CD’s being put out today are mixed in such a way they could not have been released on vinyl. Well,. They could have, but they would have sounded terrible.
While I know many people say they like the sound of vinyl better, it might have more to do with the kind of compression and style of recording used in the analog days. The new digital compression allows you to dynamically strangle the life out of a track. Many engineers are doing this to make the overall track louder. For some reason this has become quite the trend, one I personally can’t stand. I’m not going to get into compression, but in a nutshell it boosts the lower volume sounds and cuts the louder ones so every thing ends up at the same overall volume. As an example, listen to the voice of your average FM DJ. Their voice is compressed at a pretty high ratio, which is why they all sound the same. Heh heh. Overcompression ends up making a track sound flat.
And my last parting shot at vinyl… Every time you play the record it breaks down just a little. CD’s don’t do this because nothing is dragging across the surface when it plays.
I really enjoyed vinyl records though. Nothing was better then buying a new album, ripping open the cellophane and checking out all the cool artwork. Double albums were even cooler.
). But is the approximation something a human ear can really distinguish, or am I just reacting to the absence of background noise?