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.")

Comments

"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[Anonymous Coward]

And the longevity of analog tape? It decays. We have a steady stream of older musicians who are desperate to use our ancient reel-to-reels for a chance to digitize their brittle, fragile old tape recordings.

No storage medium is permanent, but PCM audio has remained mostly unchanged since Max Mathews, Bell Labs, 1957.

stupid industry know-nothings

[Anonymous Coward]

Albini records to analog tape, not because he's in love with the sound of analog. No, he's concerned that as digital formats continue to evolve, today's digital recordings will be unplayable in the future. I loved the way Albini put it: "I feel it would be irresponsible to give my clients digital files as their permanent masters, knowing they would eventually disappear or become unusable, so I won't do it. Some of the bands I work with don't appreciate the difference, or take seriously the notion that music should outlive the people who make it, and I understand that." Still, Albini feels that analog tape offers the best chance for recordings to survive. I agree, and analog tape can be used to create great sounding high-definition digital masters. That's not true of the vast majority of recordings that are being made today; most are limited to 48-kHz/24-bit digital.

Seriously, WTF? Apparently, Albini hasn't heard about the troubles studios and bands that existed before 1980 have been experiencing with their archives. They have to bake the tapes in the oven to get one last good play before the substrate disintegrates entirely. With digital, at least, you can keep backing up your precious masters to new formats without loss, to say nothing of the benefits of having redundant clones stored in disparate locations. I doubt very seriously that capability to read WAV or other formats that are simply a header tacked onto interleaved PCM samples will ever be lost.

Then the schmuck writing the article thinks noisy analog tape has "higher definition" than 24-bit digital. The fight against audiophoolery and ignorance will probably never end...

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[drkim]

Analog tape playback is still available, after almost a century...

Unfortunately, analog (magnetic) tape starts shedding oxide after about 15 years.
Magnetization starts to print through and creates pre and post 'echos.'
As the magnetic signal weakens, the signal-to-noise ratio degrades.
To be archived, you have to bake the tape (in an oven) and then you get one playback on your analog deck, so it can be digitized for archive.

If instead you record it onto another magnetic tape, you've just added more tape hiss and distortion that wasn't there in the original.

If you want true 'analog,' go to a live concert with no amplification.
If you want fidelity: record, mix and deliver digitally.

I don't want to sit at home and listen to analog tape hiss, or wow, or flutter, or dynamic or frequency limitations. (or for so-called vinyl "purists": vinyl record noise.)
I don't want to hear all the limitations and artifact of the recording media.
I want to hear what the people sitting in the studio heard. Digital get me closer to that than analog tape.