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There are a huge amount of people that claim digital recording has now surpassed analogue in terms of accuracy and fidelity.

Most of the time they are more than willing to back that up with graphs and technical data sheets explaining exactly how a format that basically teleports the sound from the converter to your speakers is superior to a an outdated format that records music in a linear fashion.

Pinch of salt, analogue is still king. Dig is good and even adequate for what I do but what I am hearing from a 16-track 2" is not just favourable harmonic distortion, it's recording music in a linear way with no need for reconstruction from 1's and 0's from a hard drive.
It's not the be all and end all but to me analogue tape (done well, there is a huge amount of room for error) is still THE BEST sonically.

Here's some things I don't understand:

You have a signal, but for sonic reasons you don't compress the transient of that signal. Your ear supposedly isn't a mechanism that responds to those transients either. So you've applied your relative gain reduction in the form of threshold-based compression, but what about those transients that you didn't compress?

Tape says "fuck those, your ears don't care about those anyway", while digital says "hey there amigo, you're going to clip me if you're not cafeful". When those transients clip in the digital realm, you do hear them, but I was taught that the ear can't react that quickly.

At the end of the day I'm just confused. How quickly can the ear react to sound? Can there be a two stage compression that emulates the sound of tape by being a peak limiter first, then a program leveler second? Is tape a sort of peak limiter across all channels? Is compression something that a lot of people talk about but that I just don't really understand what the hell they're talking about? How many milliseconds are in a second anyway?

I'm going to weigh in and say that I've been working on a tape only project for the last two weeks, and when I switched back to a digital only project I was working on, I heard things that I had never heard before. I am convinced my eyes are hogging way too much brain power and I will now do everything exactly the same as before, but reminisce over the days when my ears where the only stimulus receiver, and the red l.e.d. was my only visual que.

kerble wrote:nice effort, bebio.


I'd love to see it, too.

thanks for your support guys.

I already have a BETA version of my pdf, but I still need to tweak a few things in it (for example, some of the posters are not yet correctly credited, and I need to get at least that part straight, before sharing it.).

Maybe next week I can start posting yousendit links for anyone who's interested.

And if anyone still has the pictures in their hard drive of Velocity session documentation pics, I would be very happy if they could send them to me for inclusion in this document. The original pictures have disappeared from this forum...

And if anyone has recorded at Electrical Audio and has pictures of mike placements, or other useful pictures, along with some comments to them, that were not already posted in this forum, I'd love to hear from them as well.