lucasetten

hmm..I wouldn't say it needs to be "muddier". Why someone would want a recording to sound "muddy" is beyond me. Unless their metaphor is different than mine. It's hard for me to have an opinion on the song because it is more or less a short instrumentation. Production can go it multiple directions... Howevever I feel the guitars are too dominant, it needs a bassline, drums could be mixed a bit better, and then a different melodic idea in there as well.

if you listen to the top 40 radio, you can hear the auto-tune. Good musicians rarely get played on the top 40 radio stations. I have heard of engineers for big artists that will actually graphically auto-tune vocals and then graphically auto-tune the already auto-tune vocal.

Just for argument... At 24 bit sampling depth, there's not going to be much in the way of stair casing in digital recording either. It's there but on an infinitesimal level. That's 16 million possible steps from 0dB down to the floor. At some point a sufficiently fine grained digital system becomes effectively equivalent to an analog system in any practical terms. Since the 'measuing device' here is the human ear, that's far, far beyond the human ear's ability to distinguish one sample level from another. If you have a -120dB floor, that's 0.0000075dB per step. Most folks can probably barely hear a quarter dB change reliably, so that leaves more than a bit of leeway. Even if you aren't using the full drange (peaking at -6dB, say) that still leaves at a tiny fraction of a dB per sample stepping. Obviously the sample rate plays into that as well, but you are free to do 24/96K, which would just be so far beyond any human ability to distinguish that it's not worth worrying about. Particularly when, whichever way you record, you are going to put it out to 16/44.1 digital format anyway. perhaps..but to me tape just sounds better.

with tape(analog) there is no sampling that occurs, thus there is no stair-casing. There is no binary number assigned for a certain voltage, like there is with digital audio. When signals get above 0dB the clip in the digital realm, when you push signals to tape hard, the tape acts as a natural soft knee compressor. This is a good read above digital audio however: http://www.rane.com/note137.html