Is it worth it to record tracks onto analog first?

[UstadKhanAli]

i could list you all my commercial experience as a composer / producer but i'm not getting into some pissing contest with you. suffice it to say, i know what i'm doing. the record and publishing companies i do business with think so, too. i never heard an mp3 sound as good as a WAVE or AIFF of the same recording. that's my experience. so you can stuff the insults and have a nice day.

 

1. I disagreed with you; I did not insult you. I am allowed to disagree with you. You are allowed to refute my statements with facts or observations, which you haven't done.

2. I've never heard an MP3 sound as good as a WAV or AIFF file of the same recording either. No one here has said that they have. You, in fact, quoted me saying exactly that before you began trumpeting your commercial experience.

3. Do you feel it's more effective to stay on topic and refute facts or to try and "pull rank"? You could have 100 gold records on your walls and it won't change facts.

4. You have not addressed any of the main points that any of us are trying to make.

5. I hope that you have a happy holiday, and I don't mean that facetiously.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

Well yeah, I don't think anyone's saying that a WAVE and a MP3 sound exactly the same. What they're saying is that the ideas of "as soon as you compress to MP3, any characteristics gained by recording analog are lost" and that "why spend time making things sound good when people are just going to listen to compressed versions anyways" aren't exactly true.

 

 

Thank you very much for understanding. You get at what we do.

 

Ultimately, why we care so much is because we want to support the vision and artistic statement as much as possible. That's what drives us, as musicians and recording engineers, to achieve as good of a recording as possible. If I didn't care deeply about making studio recordings, I wouldn't hang out here. And I don't know why anyone who felt that audio quality didn't matter would want to post here.

[Beck]

Great points from Lee, Phil and Ken.

 

Yeah, IMO there

[halljams]

 

+ eleventy billion to everything Ken said above.

 

 

Good Number Lee.

[UstadKhanAli]

That is a fine number, innit? And it's a LOT.

[Instrospection]

Well, if it's a good three head analog deck (Studer, Ampex, MCI, Otari, etc.), and not a narrow format "prosumer" model, then you may indeed want to give it a try. One common technique is to do a "pass through". You run the mic preamps into the analog deck, and route the audio outputs of the analog deck into your DAW's multichannel interface. Set the analog deck for monitoring off of the playback head ( not the record / sync head)... arm the tracks on the analog deck, arm the tracks on your DAW, and roll tape / spin disk on both. The audio goes from the mikes, into the preamps and then into the analog machine. It hits the record head and gets printed to tape, and a few dozen milliseconds later, the freshly recorded tape passes over the playback head, and the recorded audio is played back and routed out of the analog deck and into the DAW, where it gets recorded a second time; post tape. A similar technique (I learned this from Craig Anderton years ago) can be used to process tracks that were already recorded into a DAW. Route the audio out of your DAW and into the analog deck, set the same way I described earlier. The output(s) of the analog deck are routed back into the DAW, and recorded to new tracks. There will be a delay involved; the amount will depend on the tape deck head spacing between the record and playback heads on the analog deck, as well as the tape speed it is running at. Just nudge or drag the newly recorded tracks back into alignment with the original tracks. There are some significant advantages to using the second technique - assuming you did a good job recording the tracks to the DAW to begin with. You can experiment with how hard you "hit" the analog tape, without the risks that come with recording directly to analog tape first. This is going to be less of an issue for old dudes like me (and possibly your teacher friend - no disrespect or offense intended ) who have a decent amount of experience with analog recording, but for someone who has never tracked analog, it's fairly easy to track with inappropriate levels, and analog VU meters won't tell you the whole story - you have to watch the peak meters (if the deck has any) and really listen to what's coming back off that playback head. Hit it too hard and you'll distort the signal too much and over-compress it, hit it too easy and you wind up with a lousy signal to noise ratio and a noisy / hissey recording... but with the second method, you can experiment over and over if need be with how hard you're going to hit it without risk to the original recording, which is safely on separate tracks on your DAW. You can also experiment with different tape formulations, recording speeds, over or-under biasing the analog deck, etc. etc. - all of which will affect the resulting sound. By the way, that same basic setup, with some minor changes, can also be used for real tape delay, flanging and automatic double tracking (ADT) effects. While my primary recording rig is a Pro Tools HD|2 Accel setup, I still keep an analog deck in service for these very things. Rather than passing everything through the analog deck, I prefer to take more of a "pick and choose" approach, and only "process" the tracks where I feel it is giving me tonal benefits.

 

Some cool words, Phil. That sounds sort of like Dave Fridmann's approach to making albums......he records certain things in analog; others in digital, depending on the instrument or song. I'm not sure exactly how he does it, rather that he uses digital and analog elements in what he feels they do best, rather than hardlining the approach that most people do.

[Instrospection]

 

Yes, of course you do. But considering most people listen to MP3's on cheap headphones, car stereos, boom boxes, cheap computer speakers... they aren't likely to miss those frequencies anyway. The point is that given a decent source recording and mix , you can encode an MP3 in such a way that it doesn't lose the impact of the music. I've listened to plenty of music on cassettes and AM radios in my time, too - I certainly never thought that was a high fidelity listening experience, but the excitement and quality of a good recording vs. a bad one still came through. I don't find MP3's much different.

 

 

I don't know......for some reason, that hiss of cassettes and all the wildness of turntables (wow/ flutter, vinyl pops/ clicks), it just had an unpredictability to it that gave the music a bit more of mystery, more dangerousness. Of course, it doesn't function like that on an overt level.....more like the fact that the hiss was so loud on 2nd generation tape dubs that there was a sonic element to it that was almost like another harmonic, it sounded like you were going to blow your stereo out at lower levels, the fact that the music was rising above this din of noise. Now, when you have a background noise floor of zero, all you're hearing is silence.....like a clock ticking in the room. It was weird that when cds revealed the low noise floor of the medium, that room noise, preamp mic noise, tape hiss (even from well calibrated machines) became very apparent. I remember listening to studios done on analog tape in big studios that were duplicated on cassette or vinyl, and hearing the same recordings duplicated to cd. Let me tell you, it was WEIRD hearing the music without that tape hiss or phono preamp noise/ hum. But back then, hearing that needle put to the grooves and that vinyl noise and the hiss on cassettes, it somehow felt like an experience. It was imperfect.

 

MP3's, to me, are just an inferior version of a digital copy. The only thing dangerous about them is the perfection.....or the dangerousness of a producer ripping his hair out at how a 128 KBPS soundfile corrupts what sounds like everything over (Nyquist) 28-32K. The industry tried for years to try to get the duplications to sound as perfect as possible.....now when you do that to a digital file, all it has is this weird data compression in which it--to me at least--robs it of harmonic content and the subliminal elevation that it has from the master tapes and even the digital masters and digital wav files. Even when you take analog tape material, when you put it through digital mastering and digital MP3's, you're removing the color that even the mastering medium used to lend......because the master (sent to the duplication house) was the first copy of the master mixdown performances, then the regular audience's copy was actually the second copy off of the original mix.

 

When someone uploads that via MP3, that's a third generation copy.....and I don't care what anyone says, when you start making that many generations where people can alter things like EQ, levelling, bit rate/ sampling, you're going to get more unquality events happening. No wonder people are being less moved by music.....an MP3 is a third generation of the master mix. Imagine seeing a duplicate print made off of a duplicate print of the Mona Lisa.....the colors would be changed, the nuances would be exaggerated or reduced. The audience thinks that they're getting the whole experience, but really, they're not seeing the brushstrokes and the exact color hues that the artist used. As a matter of fact, someone could even paint eyebrows on the painting, if they so wished to.

 

These eyebrows, IMHO, are different KBPS rates.

[halljams]

 

That is a fine number, innit? And it's a LOT.

 

 

Wow is it ever a lot. It might be the biggest number we know of.

Biggest i know anyway.

[the stranger]

What analog tape deck were you considering using?

 

I don't think it matters. Electric guitar sounds better on a 16th of an inch of cassette tape than standard 44.1 conversion.

[UstadKhanAli]

Oh, no....you found this thread!

[nice keetee]

So I know this highschool music teacher who does all the recordings for the school choirs and bands, and he does everything onto analog tape, reel-to-reel. I'm getting ready to record my band's new album, and I thought it'd be cool to record the tracks onto analog; for both the novelty/fun aspect of it, and because the sound I'm aiming for is something that would sound great on vinyl, a more warm sound, that I always associate with analog. He mixes everything analog as well, but I would want the tracks on my computer to mix with Logic. I'm not sure how the transfer would work, other than muting all but one track+recording each track to a CD. But regardless of how it would work, is it worth it? I've never really compared the sounds of an analog recording to a digital -- would I indeed get the warmer sound that I'm going for, or would it be barely noticable?

 

Try it, you might like it.

[the stranger]

Oh, no....you found this thread!

 

My tape sensors lead me here. When I saw the title, I thought I could surely put my two cents in there.

[stopthebus]

Alright, well I got my hands on a Tascam TSR-8, so I'm going to give it a shot. Hopefully I can figure out how to work it before I have to give it back.

[wwwjd]

Role reversal: What if DIGITAL came out first and ANALOG was recently invented?

 

I gotta believe that digital would be THE sought after format, mixes would be great without question, and analog would kinda be a joke.

 

"What's that? you record magnetic waves onto a strip of oxide shredding tape? This is good becuase WHY? OH oh oh it colors the sound? This is good because WHY? HAHAHAHAHAHA get out of here!"

[UstadKhanAli]

But it's hard to say because so much of digital recording emulates analog, and if analog didn't exist, that would radically change how digital would be.

 

You might get people thinking, "Hey, this digital stuff is really twinkie sounding, but this new analog thing is seriously fat!!! What a fantastic new sound!!"

 

Or they might say, "Mehhhh. It's a pain in the ass to set up, and I have to keep aligning the machine and storing all these tapes. And it sounds really different and I don't really like this at all. And damn, it's a lot heavier. And I have to buy a lot more cables now."