If anyone here really knows their shit, and I mean really, really knows their shit, you’ll know who Rupert Neve is. And if you know who Rupert Neve is, I’m happy to share a few quotes from an interview about about what the great man himself has to say on the subject.
I believe this is Roger Ebert’s rant on digital projection.
I have no idea who Rupert Neve is, and I suppose if I really knew a lot about him you wouldn’t need to pass along those quotes. But since I don’t, maybe some quotes or a cite might help me out…
Lets me try to address the original questions more directly, and try to stay away from the great debate of Analog v. Digital.
This isn’t exactly a question, but I’ll comment on it.
His description of his recording process, and the specific example he gives of recording the Machine Gun Etiquette vinyl vs. the CD, make it clear he has made changes in both the levels and frequency response of the signals as he records them. These changes will absolutely swamp any small differences in analog vs. digital.
Also, the CD has been “remastered”, which means any number of changes in equalization, mix, even timing may have been done.
And he is recording them in as mp3s, which is a “lossy” compression. Things get thrown out to make the recording smaller. The decision of which things get thrown out is made on the fly, by the compression software. Feed the same compression software two similar but slightly different signals, and different things get tossed, different things get changed.
In other words, the differences in sound have little to do with analog vs. digital, and much to do with the choices of the engineers who did the original analog mix and the newer digital mix, with his own choices during his recording, with the choices of the compression algorithm, and with his preference among the results.
This depends on what you mean by “sounds better”. Does “sounds better” mean a more accurate reproduction of the original signal, or does “sounds better” mean that I like the resulting sound more?
In most situations concerning commercially available music, a well-made digital copy will almost certainly sound more like the original source than an analog copy. Although at the high end of the art, the differences can be extremely tiny.
But is an accurate copy the best definition of “better”? Maybe not. It’s pretty easy to argue that if some distortions reliably sneak into the signals, and if the effect of those distortions is to make the sound more pleasing to many listeners, then that is better sound, distortion and all.
And even discounting “euphonic distortions”, there are trade offs in every recording/playback process. Some people will like one set of trade-offs better than an another.
My feeling is that given the current state of both technologies, getting better audio recordings and playback equipment out to the consumers is easier to do with digital.
But if you want to talk about the extreme high-end, money is no object, do whatever it takes kind of recording, then the differences are so small as to be undetectable by 99.9% of the existing people and equipment. In that last .1% of people, there can be disagreement, but it’s at least partially still a matter of taste.
I still vote for digital, as I feel accuracy should be paramount, and my experience and research seems to indicate that getting that all-out, let me hear every subtle nuance kind of accuracy is a little better with the best digital recording/playback compared to the best analog recording/playback. But it is debatable.
vknowles, Rupert Neve is generally regarded as the most brilliant electrical engineer to work in the Recording Industry in the last 100 years. He occupies a very narrow niche - specifically, the equipment used during the recording process in recording studios - stuff like mixing desks, and mic pre amps, and those sort of things.
However, if you’ve ever been involved in recording studios, equipment and speakers made by the Rupert Neve company are regarded as the Himalayan peaks of studio gear. He’s an incredibly knowledgeable and intelligent man who is smart enough to know that he has to flow with the times but also, has enough runs on the board through having had his mixing desks involved in literally hundreds of the world’s most famous classic albums these past 40 years that well, when he speaks, people listen.
Give me a few hours and I’ll get together some of his better interviews.
He has lots of interesting stories of people being able to hear stuff which theoretically they shouldn’t be able to hear. He believes that it’s possible for ultra-sonic sounds to influence sounds in the hearable range because of the way that harmonic soundwaves overlap. We’re getting into very, very esoteric territory here, and Rupert Neve also believes that the 24bit/192Khz digital sampling standard is the absolute minimum required to meet some of his demanding requirements - nonetheless it’s fascinating to hear the sound recording opinions of a man who’s on a first-name basis with everyone from John Williams to George Martin to Quincy Jones.
IMHO: Neve were the top mixers, but were eclipsed by SSL *because * Neve didn’t keep up with the times…
Both form an ever dwindling pinnacle of an expanding market…
Cost has a lot to do with it … why pay £250,000 on a mixer when a £20,000 one will sound just as good when played on your average bog standard home audio set up. Which, let’s face it, is what the large majority of people have…
Remember NS10’s with tissue paper? - a fraction of the cost of Ureis…