BoooM wrote:KaiS wrote:As audio engineer having gone through all types and combinations of analog and digital recordings during my career, I can confidently say:
Analog tape- and digital recordings are totally different things sonically.
Not only is analog tape ALWAYS driven into saturation during recording, this process is repeated while mixing from multitrack to stereo, adding up to two-figure percentage of distortions.
There’s no need to underlay this by extra measurements, this is indeed common knowledge for decades of recording practice.
Producing music on analog tape is different in every aspect, compared to recording in a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) today.
So even if you leave out the sound of analog tape and the audio engineer’s way to work around and with it‘s limitations – at least equally important is: the way working with artists is different, everything has to be played in realtime, at least once.
No way to edit out any little mistakes or non-precise performances with computer tricks etc. etc.
The artists simply perform different, this alone changes the sound much more than some technical aspects do.
No wonder analog recordings sound different.
I'm not that experienced with tape, but you only list its shortcomings. I think tape can better follow the signal in the time-domain than digital can. This may not be true for the future, but this is my impression for current generation digital.
That being said, when putting on a vinyl of an analogue recording, there is some magic which I miss in digital. And when I then switch back to digital, I get some freshness which I miss on vinyl, probably because the signal is cleaner and has more dynamic range.
Misunderstanding.
The mentioned facts about analog tape recordings are not negatives, just special characteristics analog tape have.
As audio engineer you work with it, use them to your favor.
The following is about professional open real wide track tape recording, NOT cassette recorder‘s.
Typically 1/4” tape for stereo, 2” tape for 16 or 24 paralleled tracks, running at 15 or 30 ips (inch per second) speed.
Dynamic range ca. 70 dBA, referenced to 3% harmonic distortions.
3% it is absolutely tolerable, because tape saturates very soft and the generated distortions are almost entirely K3, which is the second octave harmonic, musically.
This means driving single instruments hotter, even into saturation way above that 3% THD mark, enriches their sound, not destroys it.
Peaks of percussion instruments are not absorbed, but transformed into overtones letting them sound more attacky.
Single note instruments and vocals get a dynamical brightening up in their harmonics range.
That’s what is done if you look at the typical way of producing music since (analog) multi track recording was invented:
You start with recording all the instruments and vocals on separated tracks, typically 24 tracks spread on a 2 inch tape.
Nasty intermodulation distortions (distortions from overdriving A MIX of multiple frequencies) are largely avoid, because the instruments still are all separated.
In the second step, mixing those tracks to stereo tape, audio engineers usually are more careful with the levels and even have better control of them, than in a live recording.
Still analog tape is quite useful to softly cut excessive peaks, if they are short enough this stays unnoticed.
When I transfer analog tapes to digital these days, I’m always astonished how loud the masters come out without any extra measures.
With today’s digital recordings you have to do a lot of the above on purpose using special DSP processing.
The advantage, if you need a clean path you can just leave those away.
