Hot Take „¢: I like both.

I just wrote a whole big thing about 1" 16 tracks but thought better of posting it. I'll just say this. Chris Brokaw, FM Bob Weston and myself were working on our new record the other day in Bob's basement. We recorded the bulk of it on a computer in my basement last year but still needed to do a couple vocals and a bit of editing. We literally hooked up a mic and pre and went into a MOTU. The vocal sounded great, the in the box reverb sounded great, the editing was painless and sounded great. The rough mix sounded great. We all took a moment to acknowledge how insanely cool it was that we have a totally professional recording setup on Bob's fucking laptop! When we all started recording, that would have been an absolute pipe dream. When I was cutting my teeth on a 1/2" 8 track with one shitty compressor and one shitty reverb, I would have given my left nut for the power, flexibility and fidelity that is available to everyone these days. I say this as someone who owns and loves tape machines.

n.c. wrote:i am betting that investing in a 1/4 2 track (or two) and a backup multitrack will be cheaper/more economically viable in the long run than getting an interface, a dedicated computer, convertersEmphasis mine because if you have an interface you don't need converters. n.c. wrote:and storage, plus all the time wasted backing up files.A 1TB hard drive costs less than one reel of 1 tape. Actually, it probably costs less than a brand new reel of 1/2 tape. For the price of one reel of 1 tape you can buy a 500GB or even 1TB SSD drive. One TB at Google Drive is $2/month. That's pretty cheap.n.c. wrote:i just can't with digital, Sure, staring at a screen sucks, but how much of it is because of the ergonomics of your setup? Do you have a big screen? Is it set to the side? Spend some time figuring out your setup and it might work better for you. Also, you don't have to mix in the box. Don't you have a mixer?n.c. wrote:and recording to analog is rare enough to be a commodity unto itself. kids are buying cassettes again! new all vinyl record stores are opening and surviving. These two things are different. Once you tell a band the cost of tape for the project they will most likely tell you to record them digitally.n.c. wrote:managing fucking data storage is a fucking pain in the ass and gets expensive. I think I just showed you how it's not at all expensive, and by the way, you don't need to be the keeper of the projects you record. I don't understand how managing the data is a pain. You drag the folder to your cloud account or another hard drive, go make some coffee, and by the time you're back it'll be done copying/uploading.n.c. wrote:so if i wanted to track to digital it would definitely require a dedicated computerIt's smart to have a dedicated computer, but I've seen studios run on laptops or Mac Minis. If you're just using your computer as a recorder, you can get away with something cheap, like a dedicated Mac Mini.n.c. wrote:plus a 16in/16out interface just to get to where i am right now. You can buy a used MOTU 16A for $1000 or less. You could easily afford that if you don't buy a 1/4, or you know, sell your 1 Tascam. n.c. wrote:plus the computer i'd be investing in has an expiration date. Yes and no. I'm using a 2012 MacBook Pro that's still going strong. Electrical used (still uses?) a Mac Pro that is over 10 years old. So yes, a lot of electronics nowadays is made to be obsolete in a few years, but in my experience Macs have been surpassing their life expectancy, just like tape machines have surpassed theirs. I'm not trying to shit on your plan or your studio, but even if you ignore all the above, your plan has two pitfalls. The first is that if you record wholly on analog, then projects have to start and end in your studio, and by doing that your close yourself to a lot of business. Maybe someone will want to record at your space but mix somewhere else, or vice-versa. Maybe they're bringing in some tracks, etc. The second is that the Tascam 1 16 tracks format is LoFi, but even if we ignore that, it's just not a very common format. So again, you're closing yourself and your studio even further. With only a 1 machine, it'll be even harder to bring projects in or take them out. If you want to be an analog only studio, then a better investment would be a 2 machine.

twelvepoint wrote:eliya wrote:Yes and no. I'm using a 2012 MacBook Pro that's still going strong. Electrical used (still uses?) a Mac Pro that is over 10 years old. So yes, a lot of electronics nowadays is made to be obsolete in a few years, but in my experience Macs have been surpassing their life expectancy, just like tape machines have surpassed theirs. +1 on this. My Mac Mini from the same era is still running well (after upgrading the RAM). Am wondering: at some point, do you stop upgrading the OS? Experience has shown that with phones and my iPad, there will come a time when an OS upgrade is a bridge too far for old hardware. Assume this is true for Mac OS as well.This is my experience too with phones. As far as my Mac, I'm on OS 10.12.6. There's a newer OS, but I haven't gone there yet because I'm worried some software will require updating. If I only used my computer for recording, I would not care about updating the OS in the least. Also, in the interest of full disclosure I should have mentioned that I upgraded the RAM and HD on my laptop.

Justin Foley wrote:The cost of tape isn't nothing, but should be seen as the price to pay for the advantage of permanency. While tape itself is very resilient, you have to remember that tape machines require maintenance and quite a bit of knowledge. Knowledge that will be lost soon. Most people who maintain and repair tape machines are in their late 50s or older. People who designed tape machines are almost all gone (is Jay McKnight the only living tape machine designer? I hope we get 30 more years with that man). There's a lot of knowledge that is going to die off with the old timers. I know that technically in the future you could get a machinist to make you a part you need, and electronics is electronics - you can learn it, but tape machines are sophisticated. I don't pretend to be any sort of authority, but having a basic knowledge of electronics and working on my own tape machine was humbling. The circuits are complex, and are semi-digital and I still don't understand it all. I also learned that a lot of the troubleshooting comes experience. I see this first hand on the several tape machine mailing lists I'm on. My point is that right now tape machines are niche, and in thirty years they will be even more of a niche, and there will be a lot less capable techs around to take care of them. Because it's not the industry standard now and it's not going to be, there will be even less money and time that can be put into research and design to bring old machines back to life, or design new ones. I love analog recording, so I would be happy to be proven wrong.Justin Foley wrote:Digital backup storage - even whatever current cloud based storage is chosen - is temporary. Sure, but if a tech giant like Google collapsed in a day and we couldn't retrieve our files, then I think we'll have bigger problems than old sessions. More to the point - cloud storage shouldn't be your primary back up solution. You should have an SSD to back up to. Even better have a simple RAID setup to back up your files. That investment is still cheaper than tape, even when you factor in replacement drives in the future.

Just when it seemed that the analog v. digital threads had gone away.Back in the saddle, yo.

twelvepoint wrote:As an adjunct to your first point, the near instantaneous recall of previous sessions is a game-changer. My own band - people in their 40s with kids - were able to track and mix piecemeal over the course of a year with little concern about calibrating machines or manually recalling console settings and patches. We'd just go in for an evening and instantly pick up where we left off. It's a whole methodology that didn't exist back when the workflow of making records usually meant spending several contiguous days in a studio.Good point. I feel like this is some combo of the two benefits I mention but it warrants its own mention. = Justin

After thinking about this a lot, I believe there are two primary advantages to digital recording and one to analog.- Digital recording is easier to edit and manipulate. - It is also easier to share with others.- Analog recording has greater permanence. Depending on the intention of the recording, these benefits will weigh differently on your consideration of what to do.I do not think that either approach has an inherent advantage over the other with regards to either sound quality or cost. Either approach can yield excellent (or awful) sound fidelity. Each can also yield a distinctive sound that emphasizes potential artifacts of the process. With regards to cost, the time horizon for cost consideration is too big a variable to score a KO for either approach. It is much cheaper to get started with digital recording, but the costs involved tend to evaporate and also recur; software upgrades abound, plug-ins do not hold value and hardware issues are usually solved via replacement over repair. Analog, on the other hand, takes a fair investment in hardware to get going. That money spent may hold value that can be recaptured (somewhat) at resale. Or it may disappear in the costs of maintenance and repairs, especially if you're not able to fix stuff yourself.The net value expenditure of either approach is likely to look very different at 1 year vs 10 years.The cost of tape isn't nothing, but should be seen as the price to pay for the advantage of permanency. Digital backup storage - even whatever current cloud based storage is chosen - is temporary. The fact that the arguments raised in the Radar 24 remain valid 15 years later shows the persuasiveness of the permanency argument.= Justin

i almost started commenting on the digital archiving thread, but i really wanted to get into the hidden costs of digital in re: operating a small project studio. i'm starting with a bunch of gear and a tape based platform. i mix to digital currently through an inexpensive 2in2out interface. just mixing into the box, i'm maxing out storage on my laptop, so if i wanted to track to digital it would definitely require a dedicated computer, plus a 16in/16out interface just to get to where i am right now. plus the computer i'd be investing in has an expiration date. i'm getting a 1/4" 2 track.

all true, well spoken, thoughtfully said.all i can say is that i love the sound of one of the medium size analog formats going through an old sound craft board. period. it does not sound like the records made at electrical or other world class studios. but black sabbath made paranoid on less, and the war on drugs won the album of the year grammy on one... actually two (sean everett also has one so they were able to pass tapes back and forth) of those old ms-16s.