Rick Ruskin wrote:
On 7 Feb 2015 20:43:50 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
JackA wrote:
snip.............
The first digital pop stuff was almost entirely multitracked... and really
digital recording (in the form of the horrible 3M, Mitsubishi, and DASH
machines didn't take off in the pop world at all.
Why were these machines horrible? Bad sound? Unreliable? Cost?
Converter issues for the most part.... all of the early ones tended to
sound pretty harsh and didn't handle reverb tails very well. The 3M
machines were almosty glassy-sounding.
Listen to the GRP album "Digital Duke" for an example of everything wrong
with early digital recording.
In the pop world, there was really no reason to go the digital route, and
while a few folks used it, analogue production remained popular even decades
after the classical guys had all gone digital.
snip
No reason? Kindly explain.
What does it buy you? You don't need the added dynamic range, you don't
need the deep low end detail. But what you lost was an enormous amount of
production flexibility.
Editing the digital stuff was nightmarish... the DASH machines had analogue
cue tracks so you could find the point to cut, but some of the machines
had no real editing ability and if you did find the point to cut, it might
take a couple tries to do it without a blip. (The Nagra-D would let you
do a very silent cut in spite of the helical scan nonsense... there
was an outrageous amount of electronics involved in making that work.)
Punching in and punching out was impossible on most of the earlier machines
although by the time the Mitsubishi multitracks came out it was possible
to do a seamless punch without glitching.
But, even after the digital machines got to the point where they were
respectable production tools, they still didn't really add anything to
pop and rock production. And, of course there was a huge backlash against
the harsh sound, although some artists managed to use that harshness to
their advantage (IGY by Fagen being the best example I can think of now).
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."