Slashdot Mirror
Why Steve Albini Still Prefers Analog Tape
CNET's Steve Guttenberg ("The Audiophiliac") profiles prolific audio engineer and general music industry do-it-all Steve Albini; Albini (who's worked on literally thousands of albums with musicians across a wide range of genres) has interesting things to say about compression, the rise of home-recording ("The majority of recordings will be crappy, low-quality recordings, but there will always be work for engineers who can do a good job, because there will always be people who appreciate good sound."), and why he still prefers to record to analog tape. (Note: Albini is justly famous not just for his production work, but in particular for his essay "The Problem with Music.")
If you care about longevity, you write PCM. You know the stuff, a number per sample and channel. An idiot could look at a file like that and understand what it is with not a header in sight.
Does FLAC support 24bit/192kHz? If not, it's useless for recording masters.
FLAC supports up to 32-bit @ 655 kHz
Better than ZIP/gzip/bzip2/xz is FLAC, which is also very well documented and open-source, and thus future-proof, and better suited to audio than a general-purpose compression format.
But you're absolutely right, Albini has no idea what he's talking about.
Wishful thinking. There's a lot of stuff around that's 50 years old and is already lost in obsolescence. Conversely, there's plenty of stuff from the middle aged (paper, stone) that is perfectly accessible today...
I have CDs from the 80's and CD-R media from the mid 90's that won't play, along with plenty of bit-rot laserdiscs. I meant that comment toward player availability rather than media lifespan. I'm only confident that 50 years from now I'll be able to find a CD player around, not that all CDs made now will still play on it.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
I have a feeling you are comparing analog cassette tapes with DAW performance. Well of course, 3.5 IPS cassette tapes suck, nobody is debating that.
But a 30 IPS properly aligned Studer multitrack will have frequency response up through 80Khz and dynamic range greater than what can realistically be achieved on most DAWs.
There are merits to the old way. Wow and flutter and hiss are consumer perceptions based on inferior formats like the cassette tape and vinyl records.
Having said that, on a sub-$250k budget, many DAWs rival cheap all-analog setups.
You have no idea what you are talking about
...
But a 30 IPS properly aligned Studer multitrack will have frequency response up through 80Khz and dynamic range greater than what can realistically be achieved on most DAWs
A DAW at 88.2k samples and 24 bits can record up to 44khz, well above the ceiling of human hearing (20khz) with a dynamic range of 144 decibels (the difference between more-or-less absolute silence and putting your ear next to a 747's jet engine, which would kill you). You can purchase a converter capable of recording at this bitrate/depth for $500. I think the grandparent seems to know what they are talking about.
Now you can say that you might only get a bit depth of 20 reasonably out of a $500 converter but even if it's only 16 bits (an audio cd) you still have 96 db of dynamic range. Analog tape using Dolby-A noise reduction can have a dynamic range of around 80-90 decibels, at very best 6 decibels less than a mere CD (or even MP3!).
$250,000 is a LOT of money to spend in the audio production world. Personally I would much rather spend that on a huge mic locker, top of the line preamps, acoustic treatment etc. Tape is a royal pain - back in the day there might be a room full of people just to operate the tape decks. Now, I can plug my laptop in to my interface, launch pro tools and be up and running within a couple minutes without worrying about alignment, expensive analog tape etc.
magic is magic, though. If it helps your creative process then by all means, enjoy it! however, it seems clear now that digital is superior on a strictly technological basis