[John Williamson]

On 31/12/2015 13:57, wrote:
John Williamson wrote: "- show quoted text -
Says the voice of someone with little or no experience of real life
recording. Go to an acoustic concert, record it, then see how close you
can get to that sound with analogue and digital equipment. Digital gets
closer every time.

I've done it both ways, and my experience backs up what I wrote. It even
works for location recordings of random
sounds you'd hear as you walk around the place.
- show quoted text -"

Yeah, digital gets closer alright, if you apply
a ton of EQ, dynamics, and reverb to the thing
in mastering!
Yeah, customers buying the thing will hear a
huuuge difference, and automatically think it's
"better".

Rent or buy a digital recorder such as the Zoom H4 or similar and a pair
of decent microphones, go to an acoustic concert and record it, or just
set the gear up in the street or next to a railway line. While you're
there, do another recording with the best analogue recorder you can
find, say a Nagra portable, and compare the results. Use a pair of mic
splitters to make it fair.

You will find that to make the analogue recording sound anything like
the original, you have to use a lot of processing both during and after
recording, while the digital will sound clean straight off the recorder.
Tape is not even roughly linear, while any modern A-D converter will be
linear to within the limits of most test equipment.

I'm just saying, record the same performance to
both analog and digital decks, same mics, same
everything else, and aside from minor background
hiss, you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference.

You've never actually done this with decent playback gear, have you?

Take the digital into post, perform the
aforementioned processing, make a CD of it,
and you better bet there'll be a sonic difference!

Then apply the same processing to your analogue recording, and the
digital will still sound better. Apply the processing you need to get a
vinyl version to sound acceptable, and the CD will still sound better.

I'm not saying analog is better, not at all. I'm just
pointing out that in comparing an analog and
digital recording of the same program, the difference
most folks are going to hear was applied in post.

Do you prefer cheddar or mozarella? Is chalk better than cheese?

Run the output from the microphones into a digital recorder, and on
playback you will hear exactly what went on in the hall. Run an analogue
recorder in parallel, and when you play that back over decent speakers
or headphones you will hear why professionals went over to digital long ago.

A lot of CDs of older hits have been reprocessed to match the current
fashions by applying compression and other effects to the analogue
master tapes. Some bands and producers even use analogue tape decks to
add distortion and "warmth" to digital recordings. This does not mean
that digital needs processing to make it sound good, it means that's
what people want to listen to, and the same processing (Apart from
adding tape distortion) would need to be applied to analogue to make it
sound the way that's now expected by some of the market.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.