JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Analog Sound - Good or Bad

From one of the great sponsors here, this is an article regarding Analog recording. Very interesting.

I am a digital guy. However, remembering those fun analog day gone by, I bought a pretty good turntable a couple years ago and bought some new / old lps to go with them, including Buffalo Springfield, Lovin' Spoonful, Mamas and Papas etc. Anyway it was fun to play with them but --- the sound is awful compared to cd's. ..... and the little scratches and pops in the vinyl - even on the first play.

Tom

A group from Dayton, Ohio, I think, Guided By Voices, was praising the 4-track (I think) analog recordings they were making as being 'warmer.' I wondered if some combination of analog and digital might yield interesting results.

And I recall someone adding scratches and pops to a digital recording for the effect.

By the way, did you have a link to an article?

It is horses for courses as they say. There is no doubting that analog is warmer than digital and some old school engineers prefer analog. That said there are tons of plugins that emulate analog equipment and digital offers a wider range of choices. It is far more versatile and easier to use. The smart people nowadays use a combination of both.

I don't think it will be long before analog becomes a relic. Currently, it has a certain magic that is difficult to emulate through digital means. Ah, but how about 15 years from now...?

Mark it is a relic now....Old vintage amps, mics and other analog equipment costs a fortune if you can lay your hands on it. Some studios are going back to tapes......
My pal Dave was saying the other day that he used to spend hours trying to get rid of crackles and hums and now folk are paying a fortune to have them added as the modern digitalmusic production gear can sound sterile.

My first CD is done on tape (1995) .. the producer gave me the option, i chose the analong .. he spoke of the "warmer" sound - Soon after he started working both digital and analog until he was doing mostly all digital by popular demand; however, was recently telling me he is going back to more analog - seems people are looking for it .. but i think it will be an analog/digital combo ..
now if I sound like I know what I am talking about ... I assure you I DON'T!! hah!! Just recently had a conversation with him regaring this very topic

What is warmer about analog that cannot be duplicated by the use of EQ on digital?

All digital is actually an analog/digital combo since all sound is analog until we start storing and manipulating it digitally - and then it has to be converted back to analog so you can hear it.

I still have an old Garrard turntable and a bunch of albums and I agree the sound is awful compared to a CD. Mostly that is due to the record and the needle - not the original recording on tape. There are some great sounds available on the remastered CDs of recordings from the olden days.

I belong to Rhapsody and I was looking for some Van Morrison tunes yesterday -- and I cringed every time the only option available was the "remastered" ones (which was too frigging often for me). Yea, maybe the instrument separation has been improved, but I don't think it is really any better -- just different. Plus some of those mastering guys back then were pretty good.

I remember when I compared the Rod Stewart CD of Gasoline Alley with the LP. It really seems that they sped up the song "Gasoline Alley" a little (or my turntables were all a little slow). Much better sound on the record (to me). Technically, the CD was probably cleaner and better -- but the LP sounded better (and I am not one of those that say LPs are always better -- just that one was). I am 100% in the digital recording world, though.

Kevin

There is a lot of music avaliable today on CD that was recorded before digital became a "Household" word. There are surperb recordings that don't have any flaws. These are of course copied from Master Tape to CD. Records of course can have noise from scratches or dust if it is on the record. I understand there is a small amount of records still manufactured but not many.

As Colin noted, everything starts out as analog, and ends up analog.

Analog equipment was handmade in the old days, and this meant every unit had it's own sound. Some were bad and a few was exeptionally good. So, if you are producing on a good piece of high end analog gear, lucky you!

Many didn't really like the analog gear back then, though, so I think it's getting overly romanticised these days. Maybe by aged producers who's not as computer savy, and had one of the good units from back when.

The analog gear can be more immediate, though. When you turn a knob, you can hear the difference quick, but if you have a good digital setup, there's really not much difference, I think.

But I get, there are something about the added artifacts and the unprecise coloring of sound from some of that stuff, that's just thrilling. Old compressors, EQ's, reverbs and tape delays, for example.

But what if it was the other way around.. try emulating digital precision on analog gear!!

The first two CD's I ever heard were Yes-Yessongs and Led Zeppelin's 3'rd album. I hated them on the first digital go round. That's why a lot of 70's bands eventually remastered their older stuff themselves, they didn't like what the studio producers were doing with the digital mix. I honestly think it has to do with the music itself. For some music, especially rock, all the background noise is PART of the sound, but a lot of producers will edit it out as noise. Pump up da noise!

Analog is almost dead.

Let's have a moment of silence for analog:

Hisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

Ha ha ha!! Good one Mike. I may have to quote you on that the next discussion I'm involved in.

Rick, I made that one up about five years ago when I was asked to be a host at "The World's Largest Writer's Night" during Tin Pan South for NSAI. So you can license this joke if you'd like. I take PayPal. LOL.

Yup, that's a good one Mike though I won't be using it so don't expect a deposit to your paypal account.


Responding to the Subject...

Personally, I prefer recording to tape then moving the project to the computer where I can sample the Hisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss and remove just enough so the end result is quieter but still retains the tape sound. For the solo acoustic stuff I record I find it's less work than trying to emulate that.
I see advantages to each and if I was involved in a number of multiple tracks I'd probably not use tape at all but go strictly digital and work it from there.

Gary, sorry I forgot to put in the link.

http://blog.discmakers.com/



Tom

I used to hate hisssss. When I was in college I "produced" an lp of songs performed by bands in my college. I recorded the songs on and open reel deck (I think a Teac. I spent a fair amount of time doing whatever I could to minimize the hisssssss.

That old analog equipment was a lot of fun to use. One could spend a lot of time adjusting the phono cart angle, weight, anti-skating, etc etc. Can't have as much fun with a cd player.


Tom