the first time i ever set foot in a real recording studio, the engineer my band would be working with played us two recordings his band had done. one was to protools, the other was to 2" tape. if you ever get a chance to listen to the same band record similar songs with the same lineup, similar mic placement, production, and so forth, on both digital and analog technology, you won't believe how much better the tape sounds. it just naturally sounds more distinct and fuller. it's just that much easier to get that "jump out of the speakers at you" kind of sound with tape. at least in my experience, which should be taken with a grain of salt.

the other thing i don't think this writer understood was the art of digital recording vs. the art of analog recording. the way i see it, analog recording is "recording" in the truest sense of the term. it concerns documenting an audio signal as faithfully (and flatteringly) as possible. on the other hand, digital recording makes it much easier to manipulate that sound; thus, you can input a "bad" sound and make it sound "good" with relative ease. the computer, then, becomes almost an instrument in and of itself, another aesthetic tool without which the music would sound utterly different. so whereas analog recording focuses on the "in" signal, digital recording focuses on the "out" signal.

then there's the question of the machinery itself. a tape machine is a pretty passive device in terms of what it does... basically, any manipulation of the signal you want to do, you need to do with equipment extraneous to the machine (i might be wrong about that. correct me if so, but this has been my impression). a computer, on the other hand, is a very active piece of equipment: it's an all-in-one recorder, effects rack (several, in fact), mixer, etc.

it just seems to me that people don't know which tool to use for which job. if you're an acid-house dj, it would make more sense to use a computer, because you can chop up samples and rearrange them and manipulate them on and off in the comfort of your own home. as my friend adam, a classical french hornist, once pointed out, "the way i see it, the whole idea of techno music is to make it sound fake." if you're a rock band, it's probably in your best interest to make the band sound as much like themselves as possible (operative word "probably").

that's the difference i see. maybe it makes sense. maybe it doesn't. whatever. it just doesn't seem to me that Mr. Goodin has done his homework, that's all.

another thing. an anecdote, if you will:

being in college, a lot of my peers have ipods. that means they do not own a single physical musical document (CD, record, cassette, 8-track, whatever). personally, i have my favorite hundred CDs with me. when asked why i haven't bought an ipod yet, i invariably reply "what i really prefer is vinyl."

you should see the looks i get.

CarlitosNo wrote:I was thinking more in terms of "format". If today I save my projects as ".wav" files, it's likely that I will be able to open them, at least in mid term, on any platform that come in the market (ie protools 8.0, sequoia, cubase5, logic23...). But if new open "formats" start to come across, unless they become a standard (like those aiff or wave ones), it will be a total mess. I agree that probably there will be more quality at better price, and the possibility to change the program to make it fit your needs, but I still understand that (unless the new format become standard) new open source formats would be more difficult to play back in the future.
And I think that the point that you say about a format being playable as long as there are engineers capable of making decoders remain valid to the actual standard formats. What is wrong, and in that I agree with you, is the actual programs using those formats, not the formats themselves. And the longevity of the storage medium doesn't get solved with open platforms, does it?

(again, I may be wrong!)

if you are saving files in wave or aiff, you are covered for however long digital media can hold up. there is an open C library that reads/writes lots of different file formats and can handle both little-endian and big-endian data. it is called libsndfile.

i'm not sure how the argument of the longevity of digital media even comes into play. it is a magnetic medium just like analogue tape. by all rights a magnetic hard disk should last just as long as analogue tape. we don't know exactly how long, but there are magnetic hard drives that contain data still intact from the late 1950's.

i'm not going to jump into the analog vs. digital aural debate. i think it's fairly obvious, at least to people who study the science of sound, that resonant electromechanical force is real and there are frequencies outside of the spectrum of documented human hearing that affect the way we perceive to hear things. the binaural beats created from said frequencies may have a lot to do with this perception and the feelings we experience as well. digital has a long way to go in capturing these "feeling" frequency ranges, but it is most definitely attainable.

there's a whole bunch more that we could go into here, but it would bore most i'm sure. recording sound pressure levels at the molecular level via organic "microphones" using nanoscience would be a good topic. for instance, record a musician in a room. playback of the recording results in your ability to move closer to the musician to hear the subtleties of his/her playing, move to the side and hear what it sounded like to the side of them in the room when the recording took place. in essence, capturing a true performance. how about recording a room full of people, have someone across the room whisper something that you cannot hear during recording. now, playback the audio and walk to where the person was in the room and be able to hear the whisper reproduced with the other chatter becoming ambient.

people can argue all they want, it's this type of forward moving science i want to see come to fruition in the documentation of music, sound and information in general. just think, media isn't a problem when organic computers and quantum logic gates are realities (logic gates are already being opened and closed in labs), because the "computer" will create memory when needed. i'll still keep the tape machine for now though.

steve wrote:Interesting that the fellow who wrote the article ignored what I said specifically was my biggest objection to digital recording, the inevitability of the music's disappearance.

I have gone on about this (droned on) at length before and won't again, but I think everything else about digital recording (everything other than its lack of permanence) is a solvable problem. But, like an otherwise cute girl with a parasitic twin head, specifically one of which curses and spits tobacco juice at you every time it sees you, that one problem is enough to negate any other attractions.

I leave you, cantankerously from the hide-bound past.

Mr. Albini-

I have read your objections to digital recording that you have presented elsewhere. I have no axe to grind regarding whether digital or analog preservation of music is better......music is music is music to me. I do find a dearth of real evidence for the "lack of permanence" in what you have said though. Have we actually seen recordings in a digital format breaking down as a result of the fact that they are digital? Furthermore, what EXACTLY is it in this still rather novel digital technique of preserving music (as well as other things such as text!) that will inevitably (as you seem to think) cause a catastrophic loss of information? I have no real good evidence that this is in fact the case. I have some compact discs from the very early days of the CD and they are just fine, for example......20 years old or so.

I personally have faith that people will preserve that which they think deserves to be preserved, be it music or whatever, and if a catastrophe comes along it really doesn't matter if what is preserved is in a book or on a laserdisc or on a 200 GB hard disk or on a piece of virgin vinyl.........it'll all be wiped out indiscriminately. I just want to understand what you base these objections to digital technology of yours upon. What real, demonstrable, specific evidence have you?

With Respect-

Matt

matthew wrote: What real, demonstrable, specific evidence have you?

I have discussed this at length at recforums.prosoundweb.com, and on the very forum you are reading. Both places have search functions. I'll assume you don't just want me to recount stories of computer crashes and media that can't be read, as those are common enough to be mundane.

I submit these expired (unplayable) digital formats:

ADAM
3m Digittal
DASH
ProDigi
Mitsubishi X80, X850
DBX Digital
Soundstream JVC
Sony F1 (and variants 501, 601, 701)

All obsolete and unplayable. I should include DAT and ADAT, but there are still a few working DAT and ADAT machines out there, though none in manufacture, and none are built to last very long. Most of these formats used metal particle tape, which is chemically unstable.

I will not recount the myriad file formats that are no longer supported, as there are many. I will not recount all the digital (computer) storage media which are now obsolete and unreadable for the same reasons. Most of these used metal particle media, which is unstable.

In short, digital recording requires survival of the physical media, the file formats, the software, the computer platforms, the interfaces, the media-reading drives, whatever security dongles or passwords are necessary, and the conversion paradigm that makes it audible. All of these things are proprietary and subject to the whims of the computer industry and the frailties of businesses, both of which have proven to be willing to make things obsolete intentionally and accidentally.

Analog recordings require only the physical survival of the medium, as there is only a tpae deck needed to play them back, and one of those can even be cobbled-together from off-the-shelf components and mechanical parts if there is somehow a world-wide eradication of the millions in existence today.

Analog lasts. Digital formats don't.

instant_zen wrote:the computer, then, becomes almost an instrument in and of itself, another aesthetic tool without which the music would sound utterly different.

So right you are about this. I've been building up outboard gear for the past several years to try and "improve" the quality of signal going into my computer's card. Bought a lynx L22 and ls-aes, and digital card for my focusrite isa-428 to interface. Anyway, to the point...

All of this sounds nice - but I still find that I spend a vast majority of my time making minute adjustments in cubase with a mouse. A little eq here, a little compression there....let's see what reverb on the master buss does to the mix. It gets ridiculous, the mix never comes out satisfactory in my mind, and I get one step closer to carpal tunnel syndrome.

I recently decided to make the switch to analog, and am planning on getting a tascam 388 in the very near future. Most would see this as a backstep in quality, but I disagree. Getting to use a real mixer again, and the organic sort of process of it all I believe will result in a better recording in the long run. Also I will learn to live plugin-free, which will help me focus on the tone of my instruments, and mic placement. Also, selling all this digital interfacing should save me some money too....a nice bonus.

I'm looking forward to the switch, focusing on real instruments, and making a product that lasts.

steve wrote:

matthew wrote: What real, demonstrable, specific evidence have you?

Analog recordings require only the physical survival of the medium, as there is only a tpae deck needed to play them back, and one of those can even be cobbled-together from off-the-shelf components and mechanical parts if there is somehow a world-wide eradication of the millions in existence today.

Analog lasts. Digital formats don't.

I agree, however what about using digital as an archive? Magnetic tape surely doesn't have the same lifespan as one and zeros, which can be stored regardless of format? And copying tape as a backup will result in slow degeneration of the original content.

steve wrote:Analog lasts. Digital formats don't.

one could make a digital format that lasts.

it would be uncompressed so that every 1 and 0 is part of a 24 bit chunk starting with the first one -- there would be no proprietary file header information or anything like that and the sampling rate would be fixed at 96 khz. this would make it conceptually transparent enough to last, knowledge-wise.

the storage medium would be a super-fine titanium grid of precise and memorable dimensions. a mechanical writer would drop a microscopic red plastic dot into each "1" data point of the grid and a microscopic blue plastic dot into each "0" data point of the grid, working left to right and top to bottom. the grid would then be sealed with some amazing translucent sealing shit so that it would become an unbreakable plastic slab full of coloured dots.

this slab could be put into an optical scanner to be read. the scanner would take a picture of the grid and then convert all the dots into 1s and 0s, perfectly reconstituting your digital audio file.

use this format to preserve the masters of your recordings. put the hard plastic slabs in a cave up in the mountains and watch them outlive mankind.

shagboy wrote:

steve wrote:Analog lasts. Digital formats don't.

one could make a digital format that lasts.

it would be uncompressed so that every 1 and 0 is part of a 24 bit chunk starting with the first one -- there would be no proprietary file header information or anything like that and the sampling rate would be fixed at 96 khz. this would make it conceptually transparent enough to last, knowledge-wise.

the storage medium would be a super-fine titanium grid of precise and memorable dimensions. a mechanical writer would drop a microscopic red plastic dot into each "1" data point of the grid and a microscopic blue plastic dot into each "0" data point of the grid, working left to right and top to bottom. the grid would then be sealed with some amazing translucent sealing shit so that it would become an unbreakable plastic slab full of coloured dots.

this slab could be put into an optical scanner to be read. the scanner would take a picture of the grid and then convert all the dots into 1s and 0s, perfectly reconstituting your digital audio file.

use this format to preserve the masters of your recordings. put the hard plastic slabs in a cave up in the mountains and watch them outlive mankind.

wiseass. i'd rather plunk down a couple hundred bucks for a reel of tape.

Gramsci wrote:I agree, however what about using digital as an archive? Magnetic tape surely doesn't have the same lifespan as one and zeros, which can be stored regardless of format? And copying tape as a backup will result in slow degeneration of the original content.

this has already been addressed actually. i believe the rebuttle was something to the effect that there is no direct correllation between digital encoding and what it actually represents. you need to have something onhand that could read the ones and zeros, and, out of its own ass, pull up whatever they mean. that sounds like a pricey piece of equipment to me, and one that a recording studio (in specific) doesn't want/need lying around, taking up space.

unarmedman wrote:So right you are about this. I've been building up outboard gear for the past several years to try and "improve" the quality of signal going into my computer's card. Bought a lynx L22 and ls-aes, and digital card for my focusrite isa-428 to interface. Anyway, to the point...

All of this sounds nice - but I still find that I spend a vast majority of my time making minute adjustments in cubase with a mouse. A little eq here, a little compression there....let's see what reverb on the master buss does to the mix. It gets ridiculous, the mix never comes out satisfactory in my mind, and I get one step closer to carpal tunnel syndrome.

I recently decided to make the switch to analog, and am planning on getting a tascam 388 in the very near future. Most would see this as a backstep in quality, but I disagree. Getting to use a real mixer again, and the organic sort of process of it all I believe will result in a better recording in the long run. Also I will learn to live plugin-free, which will help me focus on the tone of my instruments, and mic placement. Also, selling all this digital interfacing should save me some money too....a nice bonus.

actually, the laptop on which i'm presently typing has Cubase (with some trimmings) installed on it. personally, i love messing around with it. i think one of the joys of digital recording--at least for those of us playing the homegame--is it's a tremendous time-waster. i mean, what could be more fun than making shit sound fucked up? my point was just that you need to know what you want to do, and get your hands on the proper tools you need to do them.

shagboy wrote:

steve wrote:Analog lasts. Digital formats don't.

the storage medium would be a super-fine titanium grid of precise and memorable dimensions. a mechanical writer would drop a microscopic red plastic dot into each "1" data point of the grid and a microscopic blue plastic dot into each "0" data point of the grid, working left to right and top to bottom. the grid would then be sealed with some amazing translucent sealing shit so that it would become an unbreakable plastic slab full of coloured dots.

I saw Amazing Translucent Sealing Shit back in '93 on the second stage at H.O.R.D.E. The solo on Unbreakable Plastic Slab that night was freaking transcendent, man.