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

how can you not play an audio file?

[alen]

all you need is a decoder program. its not like the old days when devices were dumb and we had new physical formats for every music generation. starting with CD's and DVD's every new generation of device plays most of the old formats if not every single one. the price of production drops so its not a big deal for new and faster devices to play old formats

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Tablizer]

How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future? That's hard to predict. Some new something could be just around the corner that will make people dump and forget the current stuff. And the current stuff could have some goofy DRM in it that the musician cannot detect and that limits decoder makers because they don't want to get sued.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future?

Perhaps in the same way that VXA, for example, allows you to future-proof compressed archives?

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[greg1104]

Analog master tapes normally have extensive printed notes on their label, about things like the speed used and which tracks are in what location. Digital files need similar documentation on things like format used. Studio masters being made by the musician shouldn't have any DRM silliness to deal with.

The main challenge for digital audio preservation is that all audio tracks need to be exported into simple PCM files. I would agree that some common studio digital formats will not be readable in the future. That means the musicians need to get .wav files instead of things like ProTools files. But saying properly exported and documented digital is fragile compared to analog tape is ridiculous. I expect to be able to read PCM files saved onto current CD and DVD media for at least another 50 years, while it's already hard to get good quality tape playback.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Anonymous Coward]

The easiest way by far is to do now a conversion to a non-trouble loss-less format (such as a .wav or a .flacc file) of the things to be preserved.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[NIK282000]

Can you give any examples of music that is permanently lost to an unpopular format or bad DRM? It may happen in the future that some music is abandoned due to software but music is already being lost due to lack of playback hardware. He can stomp his feet and say that tape is best but there will be a time when no one makes tape players any more, it is pretty unlikely that there will be a point in the future when we stop using computers to play back media.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[gigaherz]

Imagine a future where having access to your storage space, and being able to see the raw contents of your data is something of the distant past. When someone finds some old device, labelled as containing music, that seems to have used a PHYSICAL connection to a computer. This person tries to find the means to recover that music, but realizes that the only people with such old computers charge a huge lot of money to extract them from the device, and make them available on the new-internet, assuming they are allowed to, because the corporations that were elected to run the government have very strict rules on what data can be made available, to who, and at what price.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[ColdWetDog]

I'd worry about those expensive studio recorders not being available in the future. The chance of finding a copy of the source code for, say, FLAC and computer hardware that can run it seems higher than a specific 4 channel tape deck last made in the 1990s.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[Anonymous Coward]

it is the same principled stance as Stallman. don't wait until there is a problem - make sure there never is a problem.

I disagree with him, but I appreciate his concerns. he has spent 20 years trying to get people out from under the thumb of the RIAA, and this is one of his many tools to do so.

"because It's not a problem now" is how people paint themselves into a corner.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Anonymous Coward]

that is cause you used some half assed proprietary garbage using improper equipment well before the technology was ready, and since your not transferring this to other media that has been accepted for decades now, its quite obvious that it wasnt worth saving in the first place.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[ethan0]

that project looks pretty interesting.

but it just moves the question one step away: how do you know if the decoder can be executed in the future - will VX32 be around and supported at some arbitrary point in the future?

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Dzimas]

Actually, it was a bridge technology between Sony's PCM-3202 digital stereo mastering deck and affordable modern digital recording systems (DAT, CD-R). There was a short period in the late 1980s when PCM encoders for VHS were extremely popular, because they allowed us to create digital masters for CD replication at a fraction of the cost of having a high-end PCM-3202 in the corner of the studio. Back then, recording and mixing a CD was an expensive proposition that required spending hours or days in a "pro" studio. Mixdown from 16 or 24-track analog tape wasn't automated in the more affordable studios, so the engineer and producer would ride the faders in real-time to produce the final track. It was a complicated dance, and we'd often end up with a handful of slightly different mixes for each song. Being able to take the PCM-encoded VHS tape home and listen to each mix without having to pay for studio time really took the pressure off. Once we selected the best mixes, they'd be digitally duplicated onto a master tape that was used to create the final CD. The other mixes on the VHS tapes were either wiped or put into storage. They're not critically important, but on the off chance that one those acts became incredibly famous, there *might* be value in recovering some of the alternate takes.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[NJRoadfan]

Sony actually introduced a portable Betamax deck to be used in conjunction with that PCM adapter. If the masters were on Betamax, I'd be a bit more concerned than if it was on a far more common VHS tape.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[niftymitch]

Yes, predicting the future is not an option. It is known to be hard.

Note, some of us are open source minded and drag digital copies of this
that and almost anything with us. I suspect he is a product consumer.
and has found a media he can work with. He will have seen a lot of
digital solution come and go none of which were as good as his analogue
tool kit. Modern audio digital recording is a long way from where he
has been but is still compared to his gold-standard analog tape to validate
its quality.

The issue of "gold-standard" is interesting and tells any listener what
is needed in the studio. When a new gold standard arrives the
solution will change.

He can still mix and publish in a digital domain but the master tracks are something
he has faith in as a primary recording media.

In 20-30 years there will be another SteveA that has his own opinion and it
will be different (most likely). But I know better than to predict the future so
forget what I said.... ;)

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[gl4ss]

how about defining an arbitrary "law" for the problem..

for all file formats reading them 5 years to future from any given day is at least 5 times easier. (reading includes writing a decoder and presenter sw)

this is even true for dreaded formats like swf. for nes rom files. for gif files. for arcade rom rips. for cad files. for pcx files. for mp3. for mp3+. for aac. for mpg. for anything, if you have a file format that is hard to write a decoder today then I can guarantee that it was much, much harder to do 5 years ago.

even running the old sw seems to get easier year by year.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[mcgrew]

its not like the old days when devices were dumb and we had new physical formats for every music generation.

The "having new physical formats" is a relatively recent thing. From 1894 for the next hundred years phonographs changed little, and it was always backwards-compatible. When it changed from 78 RPM to 33.3 and 45, newer players would still play the old 78s. When stereo was introduced the new stereo records would play on old monophonic players with both channels playing through its one speaker. The design was engineered that way. A monophonic record had the up and down motions translated to sound, while a stereo record had both channels in the up and down motion and a single channel in the sideways motion, which combined with the up and down signal filtered that channel out through destructive interference.

With cassettes and 8 tracks (I never had an 8 track, I was using cassettes before 8 tracks were popular) most people recorded the record the first time they played it so they could hear it in the car. My old '02 has both cassette and CD. It was probably 1995 before I had a CD player. And a turntable bought today will play records from 1894.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[lgw]

The real problem was, he used Sony. Of course, those recordings were probably made long enough ago that it's wasn't obvious how evil Sony would become - minidisk was the first sign, and was seen as a surprising anomaly for Sony, not the way of their future.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Dzimas]

The WAV format wasn't released until 1991, and Yamaha's PDS CD Audio recorder cost about $35,000 in 1990. The technologies that you flippantly dismiss as "half-assed proprietary garbage" were actually state-of-the-art semi-pro solutions that enabled us to create award-winning music. Had there been better options, rest assured that we would have used them.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Dzimas]

Correct. The Sony system was Beta. Mine an integrated single-boxc solution by Toshiba. It still functions perfectly, although the VFD display is beginning to look a little uneven.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[lgw]

It's quite hard to find a player for wax cylinders. And if you find an old one, it likely won't play celluloid cylinders as they've shrunken enough over time to be a problem.

The broadly successful digital recording formats of today will be easily playable by players in 100 years as well. The secret to a "future-proof" format is mass use of that format, not analog-vs-digital, or open-vs-closed.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Telvin_3d]

I expect to be able to read PCM files saved onto current CD and DVD media for at least another 50 years, while it's already hard to get good quality tape playback.

I wouldn't be too sure about the 50 years thing. The manufacturers tend to state an average lifespan of around 25-35 years for burned CDs and DVDs. Based on independent testing, those turn out to be fairly accurate numbers. But they are an average. For every one that lasts 25 years, there is one that goes 45 years no problem and one that is kaput after 5.

There are two major things that go wrong. First, any minor flaws in the how the disc has been sealed and the reflective backing will oxidize over time, rendering it useless. The second thing is that the 'burning' is accomplished with photosensitive organic dyes. They can have chemical changes over time, but more importantly remain photosensitive. A single day left out in sunlight can be the end of a disc.

If you want a neat trick, leave a disc out face up in the sun and cover part of it with a piece of paper or something else. It's like one of those old time photography demos.

Archival organizations usually recommend the useful lifespan of a burned disc as 8-10 years. As in if you burn a hundred discs and store them properly you should be able to count of reading them all for the first eight years. After that statistics start taking its toll.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[ForMeToPoopOn]

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...

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Gavagai80]

Can you lend me your 8-track player?

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[Tapewolf]

Can you give any examples of music that is permanently lost to an unpopular format or bad DRM? It may happen in the future that some music is abandoned due to software but music is already being lost due to lack of playback hardware. He can stomp his feet and say that tape is best but there will be a time when no one makes tape players any more, it is pretty unlikely that there will be a point in the future when we stop using computers to play back media.

How about the Doomsday Book? Not music, but an unholy hybrid of laserdisc media using a proprietary variant hooked up to a 512k BBC Micro.

To be sure, there are a lot of examples of things that would have been lost if they had been digital - most of the recovered Dr. Who episodes, that Woody Guthrie concert from 1949, the stereo masters for Jesus Christ Superstar, Court of the Crimson King and untold others.

A lot of people in this thread seem to have been pooh-poohing the idea of using tape as an archival format, saying that you should store everything digitally and constantly reconvert it to new formats - for some reason this isn't seen as a problem, even though all of the things I've listed above were found in a shoe box or in the back of a long-forgotten cupboard etc. 40 years after they were made (nearly 60 for the Guthrie wire recordings).

No, mag tape is not perfect, and yes, some of the more exotic formats are getting difficult to play back. But archival masters are in standard formats for that reason, and it's not outrageously hard to make a machine capable of playing them back - even the sticky shed issue is understood and fixable. Mag tape is not perfect, but it can be played back after being left forgotten in a vault for decades and that is something digital does not currently offer.

Bottom line? Make digital and analogue copies. That way, at least one of them should survive.

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.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[greg1104]

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.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Grishnakh]

Which is exactly why I said these things should be transferred over to better media ASAP. No, in 1990 there was nothing better. By 1999, there certainly was.

As for audio CDs, I have a bunch from 1990 and earlier, and they all play (and rip) just fine in modern DVD-ROM drives. The power of standardization...

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[MrKaos]

I want to hear what the people sitting in the studio heard. Digital get me closer to that than analog tape.

Amen brother! I love producing music with computers. I spend hours looking for sweet spots inside the resonant wavelength of the instrument to find the right sound. I have cases of microphones that I have built up to find the right combinations of sounds.

But I still record digitally. I like Albini's sentiment about bandwidth limiting. I've found that if you record and listen at 96/24 and it sounds so realistic. I think it is a good comparison to analogue tape. However I think we are starting to get enough power to mix at even higher sampling rate and still be affordable rendering this a moot point. However music producers are about the only ones who do listen at this sampling rate and digital technology has it's own characteristics just like analogue tape does.

The difference is that whilst analogue tape's characteristics are well explored, digital recording is still evolving - and I think that is really exciting for music.

Most people's closest experience to a higher sample rate is at 44khz, but even less so, a Psychoacoustic algorithm that bust's up my algorythm evaluating and deciding what is important to hear in terms of comparisons to other transient sounds!!! I've always thought of mp3 as more advertising than anything else, so I want to make sure it's enjoyable and control that.

I'm just hoping the digital music industry can grow something beautiful in the shit that musicians have to go through.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Rich0]

How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future?

How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding of a particular type of audio tape is common enough to have players in the future?

Given nothing but a set of specifications, it will be a LOT easier to play a digital audio file than a spool of tape. if the specs are lost chances are the audio file will be a lot easier to reverse engineer than the spool of tape.

There is nothing about magnetic tape that makes it magically future-proof.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[sixsixtysix]

so in 22 years, you haven't transferred them to a better format/media, fully knowing that the playback device was getting rarer by the year?

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[sahonen]

> That means the musicians need to get .wav files instead of things like ProTools files.

Protools stores its audio as wav or aif files.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[greg1104]

There are over a billion devices in the world capable of playing CDs, and even ten years ago there were already more than 70M DVD players. No floppy drive or tape based player has ever gotten even close to that installed base. That's why these formats will still be around in 50 years.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[greg1104]

The Session File format is unique to the program though, so you might not be able to reproduce some aspects of your mixed version unless you do an explicit "bounce to disk" for every project element.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[jsepeta]

yep, not many people have the ability to play back 78's, wire recordings, 8 tracks, minidiscs, etc.

and digital files are difficult to open from floppy diskettes, especially if the original file format is for a program that no longer exists (opcode vision for Mac OS8 anyone? how about dr T's for DOS?)

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[jsepeta]

not all engineers do due diligence when writing down notes regarding tracks. and how many mp3's have you seen with messed-up metadata?

you can add notes within protools and probably several other DAW file formats. but opening a an older daw file in a 3-version newer app is nearly impossible. thanks, Logic Pro X for returning the ability to read Logic 5 files. Now I can dump my G4.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[jsepeta]

50 years? you optimist.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[gnu-sucks]

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.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[roc97007]

Can you lend me your 8-track player?

Sure, got one in the garage. Of course, it hasn't worked since 1979.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[roc97007]

All true, stipulated that youve sampled at a high enough rate with enough bits, and that you haven't compressed the living hell out of it. What I'm reading into Albini's comments is not really ludditeism, or some magic quality of analog tape, but that digital recording and mixing often loses information to compression or inadequate sampling.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[turp182]

Thanks for the info. I have an original master reel from a band I was in 21 years ago, and I've been meaning to have the tracks ripped to digital for me to remaster.

It has been stored well (70f) the entire time, I'm hoping it can be saved.

Your response was exactly the information I was looking for, to help me get off my ass and find a studio that can do the conversion... Lazy I have been.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[AK Marc]

The problems are all in the hardware, not software. So converting to digital at the earliest time would be "safest." Also, all the "almost lost" tapes and movies are copyrighted, secured, and forgotten. Torrent is the ultimate backup solution.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[dbIII]

Unfortunately, analog (magnetic) tape starts shedding oxide after about 15 years

Successful efforts to improve that life were made in the 1960s so it's more than double that now. That doesn't help with old tapes though which is likely to be very delicate.
My workplace still has plenty of reels of tape from the 80s and 90s and every now and again it turns out the current owners of the data do not have another copy and quite a few of those old tapes have been transcribed without incident. The data is digital but the medium is identical to the reels of audio tape from that time.

Anyway I think the current fuss is over lossy data formats and digital data in poorly documented formats that keep chaging over time - it's a no-brainer that analog is going to be better than that if you can keep the medium it is recorded on intact. An answer to both is some form of future proofing the digital data format so people can easily deal with files that come with zero documentation. Some other industries worked that out in the 1970s, professional audio may be a different story.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[greg1104]

What goes into the header of a .wav file is pretty arbitrary, there isn't a strong spec for that section. But as you discovered yourself, the workaround--just throwing the header out and treating it as PCM data--will fix almost every issue, and that knowledge isn't obscure (yet). While annoying, something that is more or less straight PCM has the advantage that you really don't need any additional software to decode it. FLAC is great, but it assumes you'll always be able to build the FLAC software on future systems. That's not a bad bet, but it's not a sure thing like being able to read raw PCM data.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[dbIII]

I've had 40 year old reels of tape that spent that time in a shed that got up to 100F and 80% humidity which were transcribed without trouble so I wouldn't worry about a properly stored tape that is only 21 years old.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[AK Marc]

So you are talking device reads, not format reads? I don't store anything on removable media anymore (and I don't count external hard drives as "removable" as they aren't floppy/CD style, and are instead reader and media in one). But can you read your Commodore 64 Mail Order Monsters monster file from 5-1/4 into your current PC? I'd guess not, and that's only 25 years. But my CDs from the same year work fine in every car and every existing and proposed optical disc media system I've seen. Go ahead, show me any that wouldn't play a CD. I don't physically have my MOM disks anymore, they went with the Commodore in a garage sale years ago. But if I had them, reading them physically would be hit-or-miss (if you could find a reader), but the data, if readable, would be useless. My CDs that pre-date my C64 and MOM work fine.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[AK Marc]

We will colonize space. It'll just take 150 years, or a warp drive, whichever comes first. Within 150 years, we'll identify a compatible planet, and people will line up to volunteer for the suicide mission.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[daftna]

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

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Joce640k]

How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future? That's hard to predict.

No it isn't. "RAW" format will always be readable.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[mcgrew]

The platter was introduced in 1894, and a turntable you can buy today will play a record made for it. However, as for longevity, I agree that properly archived and backed up digital media can last forever, I was correcting his statement that with analog you had to change formats every generation. You didn't.

I wonder how long that analog record on Voyager will still be readable, though?

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[ChrisMaple]

At 30 IPS low frequency response of analog tape starts failing. This is a mechanical problem having to do with the portion of a wavelength on the tape which is over the head.

A good analog tape machine reduces wow and flutter and hiss, it does not eliminate them. They are due to mechanical limitations of machining, wear, and the limits of the electronics and the recording medium. You write: "Wow and flutter and hiss are consumer perceptions based on inferior formats like the cassette tape and vinyl records. To the contrary: they are all measurable quantities that correlate to audible defects. Hiss, in particular, is inherent to all audio systems and can never be eliminated.

Tape passing over a head is subject to a phenomenon called scrape-flutter, caused by stiction of the tape to the head and the elasticity of the tape. It cannot be avoided as long as the tape contacts the head, which is necessary for good high frequency response.

The fact that you have to refer to a properly aligned Studer multitrack shows that the analog tape operation is finicky; something that cannot be relied upon by design (and something which is inherently good in a digital system.)

Furthermore, mechanical-analog equipment wears, and as it wears performance changes. Tape heads wear until the gap becomes visibly defective, long before which frequency response degrades and distortion increases. Capstans, pinch rollers, and tape guides wear.

The audio degradations of digital are much smaller and the wear problems are much reduced.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[drkim]

Unfortunately, analog (magnetic) tape starts shedding oxide after about 15 years

Successful efforts to improve that life were made in the 1960s so it's more than double that now. That doesn't help with old tapes though which is likely to be very delicate.
My workplace still has plenty of reels of tape from the 80s and 90s and every now and again it turns out the current owners of the data do not have another copy and quite a few of those old tapes have been transcribed without incident. The data is digital but the medium is identical to the reels of audio tape from that time.

Anyway I think the current fuss is over lossy data formats and digital data in poorly documented formats that keep chaging over time - it's a no-brainer that analog is going to be better than that if you can keep the medium it is recorded on intact. An answer to both is some form of future proofing the digital data format so people can easily deal with files that come with zero documentation. Some other industries worked that out in the 1970s, professional audio may be a different story.

Agreed - and agreed.

Re. shedding, a lot depends on storage conditions (i.e. moisture and heat.) The problem is that it's progressive (otherwise our heads would never need cleaning, even on new stock) which means constantly losing the S/N ratio. But it is much better on the newer stock.

Of course, in the pro world you would always want a non-lossy format, and, much like people who 'pickle' old tape machines for playback, you have to:
1. Copy your work forward into new, non-lossy formats, as they develop.
2. Keep archived software that will play your older format files.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[ChrisMaple]

The highest frequency a human can hear varies greatly with individual and age. Up until I was about 30 years old, I could routinely hear "ultrasonic" burglar alarm systems, sometimes painfully. These systems operate close to 30 kHz. I've spoken to others with the same ability.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[drkim]

I want to hear what the people sitting in the studio heard. Digital get me closer to that than analog tape.

Amen brother! I love producing music with computers. I spend hours looking for sweet spots inside the resonant wavelength of the instrument to find the right sound.

Agreed! It's understandable that people who grow up with a certain technology become attached to the qualities (and even artifact) that it engenders. I understand why people shoot film, or record on tape, if they like the texture and artifact it imparts to the work.

However, it's not intrinsically 'better' than digital. And it's certainly worse if you don't want all the artifact and limitations tape imposes.

If you are looking for a live music experience, a "musicians sitting in the room" experience, uncompressed digital is the closest we currently have.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[ChrisMaple]

Actually, phonograph records have the mono (or stereo sum) channel encoded side-to-side. This can be verified by examining the disk with a magnifier. A stereo signal has each channel on its own side of the groove. The difference results in up-down motion.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[drkim]

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

$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.

@ daftna: Dude, you are awesome. You made every point I wanted to make - and then some.

The 'money' factor aside - when I think of all the hours I've wasted with a non-magnetic tweaker in my hand, adjusting bias on a 24tr deck, track by track... hours that could have been used creatively...

...and I don't recall a single producer, or artist, or sideman ever saying, "Wow, I really like the tape hiss on this track!" or "Uh oh! The singer failed to clip (overload) the high note here. We'll have to take it again."

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[drkim]

That score of "5" needs to be stripped away because you really don't have a clue as to what you're talking about when it comes to analog. Everything you cited against magnetic tape can be debunked with a simple internet search. And yes, I've been using analog, open reel tape... since the 1970s.

Whoops! It appears that you've forgotten to log in before posting your comment.
Log in and repost so we can continue this conversation.

Thanks!

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Pentium100]

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.

This only applies to some tapes that were made wrong - basically the manufacturers used a binder that would react with moisture in the air and become goo. Baking the tape dries it out and then you can play it a few times until the moisture gets beck in

This is limited to specific brands and models of tape (go to tapeheads.net or some other forum dedicated to analog recording and you will find the list of tape to avoid). Others work fine. I have one tape that was recorded in 1951, the backing is paper (later tapes would use acetate and modern tapes use polyester) and the tape plays OK with no shedding.

When I listen to a digital recording, it feels like listening to radio, but when I listen to cassette, tape or record I see the media playing and I enjoy the music more, even though it may not be as accurate as digital.

Also, copying a record to cassette is more convenient and reliable than recording to a PC and I can play the cassette at home, on my Walkman or in my car.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[gTsiros]

don't confuse the format, which is an abstract description, with the medium, which is a physical item, susceptible to physical damage.

but yeah, if the medium can't carry the abstraction through time, it's no good.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[Cyberax]

No, you couldn't. There are no recorded cases of hearing >21KHz, hearing range is limited by simple mechanics - the smallest hairs in your ears can vibrate only at a frequency so high.

What you were hearing is likely to be the first harmonic of the alarm, probably around 18-19KHz which indeed can't be heard by grown-ups.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Cyberax]

I know people who developed complicated algorithms which model the actual physical geometry of the tapes to eliminate pre- and post-echoes to restore some archival records of early Soviet music performances.

IMO, digital is better than analog. Formats are not that complicated, just include a .txt file on each medium with short description of the format. Unless your format is designed by a complexity pervert it won't be complicated to write a translator for future digital archaeologists.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[gomiam]

And it's part of the job of musicians to know how their music is going to be published. OTOH, PCM is not as "universal" as the GP thinks. I have seen some problems with PCM because two computers had different bit-endianness.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you're human, you have never been able to hear a 30kHz signal. If you ever could, I'm afraid you've missed your chance to collect $1M from James Randi.

Ultrasonic alarm systems use a whole range of frequencies, from not-really-ultrasonic (about 15kHz, too high for most adults to hear) up to 80kHz or so, depending on model. In theory, higher frequencies make it easier to detect smaller movements. In practice, really high frequency ultrasonic transducers aren't cheap, so most alarms systems are in the lower end of that range. You also assume that all these alarm systems were working properly, with no lower frequency signals escaping. I've seen a number of ultrasonic pest repellent devices (which don't work, by the way, but it doesn't stop my parents buying them), and they can make all sorts of bizarre definitely-not-ultrasonic noises.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[TranquilVoid]

Yes, and that's the issue with digital backup in general - it requires active management. Usually that applies to the storage medium but, as you point out, it also applies to the storage format.

In this case active management is paying attention to changes in technology and, for example, converting your FLAC collection to whatever is current.

Not great fun, but then throwing your old demo tapes into a box in the garage and expecting you'll have a working player later won't work forever.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Artemis3]

The mono needle would play the stereo record, but the disc gets permanently damaged, the mono needle usually being too dull for the delicate stereo groove.

So if you got old stuff, don't try it. A mono record is usually no problem for a stereo pickup though.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Electricity Likes Me]

That's still a problem which someone trying to restore old files can figure out. Cracking suitably large encryption keys? Not so much.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[Electricity Likes Me]

Not really. Torrent will back up "some version" of a lot of media but the nature of who's doing it and why means we don't get to keep master-cuts of stuff around so easily. But this is a problem that's rife on the internet right now - it's utterly maddening that there's no way to digitally purchase music in lossless CD-quality format, nevermind 24-bit HD or better. It just straight up doesn't exist.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Alioth]

But endianness is trival to sort out, just reverse it. There's only a fairly limited range of reasonable different things that can be done to PCM, and if the worst comes to the worst, it's actually practical to try every single one of them until you hear some kind of sound.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[stiggle]

Torrent will only backup what is popular.
If something is unpopular then it won't get duplicated across the torrent seeds and so will be lost.
The best method is to use as many formats and medium as possible - tape, CD, SSD, etc.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[Alioth]

The Doomsday Book was not permanently lost. I think there's a copy on the BBC website that you can browse. There used to be another website with it on (but the operator of that site died, and the site died with them - a shame because it was more like the original than the BBC's website).

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[HonIsCool]

I'd like to see the frequency response graph of a "properly aligned Studer" up to 80kHz. Response curves in the audible band: http://www.endino.com/graphs/

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[MrKaos]

If you are looking for a live music experience, a "musicians sitting in the room" experience, uncompressed digital is the closest we currently have.

Funny you should say that - there have been times when I've been listening to a mix where people were speaking and it seems just like that - kinda spooky, but also cool.

I've found that when doing live recording digitally, bass is your friend. One particular thing I remember was recording a Jazz band and capturing the sound of a Standing Bass. Beautiful instrument. I used a bass drum mike to capture one part of the sound by asking the bassist to play some of his favourite sounds and positioned according to that. Plus two more mikes on channels that I had as spares and maaan that bass sound had so much energy to use in the recording.

Using open source solutions like Ardour and Jack is a fantastic platform to!!!

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[stealth_finger]

How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future?

The same way they know there'll be machines to play the tapes. No one is going to give your drm'd files as a master, no one.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[stealth_finger]

but that digital recording and mixing often loses information to compression or inadequate sampling.

That's all on the producer and recording techniques, not the format itself.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[u38cg]

Tape requires to be stored correctly. If not you can often get away with tricks like baking, but it is still not a perfect format. Ultimately, and I hate to use the word, some sort of robust cloud based archive will in the long run prove most satisfactory.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[multi io]

Why is this modded insightful? It makes the assumption that musicians must be computer savvy, otherwise they are branded as idiots. Sorry bud, but I am very glad that artists such as Johnny Cash, the Beatles, and the Ramones focused their time on art rather than worry to update their masters to a recent format. That's the job of the engineers.

In Albini's "use analog master recordings" world, future musicians would have to be "savvy" acquiring and operating decades-old, long obsolete tape machines. That's much more speculative than them being able to play back some form of uncompressed digital audio file on some kind of digital computer.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[smooth wombat]

yep, not many people have the ability to play back 78's, wire recordings, 8 tracks, minidiscs, etc.

Just go to yard sales or flea markets and you can find the equipment. Fairly regularly I see 8-track players, turn tables and even, surprising as it may seem, the original laser disc player with discs!

A person may not be able to play back these items, but the equipment still exists and works.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[bitingduck]

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.

You're already modded up to +5, but I was looking for someone to say all this or I was going to. Allegedly the binder problem has been improved substantially, and that the binder breakdown was associated with a particular (rather long) period of time (I'm too lazy to look it up right now). Cassettes from the same era used a different binder that didn't break down as fast. But despite the claims that the binders are now better, I don't really trust analog as an archival medium. I had all my old analog 1/4" live-to-two-track reels digitized 10+ years ago and am still glad I did. Most of my tapes had only been through a deck a few times, and all had been stored very dry and at reasonable temperatures, so they digitized very nicely, but I know other people who haven't had theirs come out as clean.

Good analog tape at 15 ips or faster can sound as clean and quiet as digital when it's new, but it loses quality every time through the deck, and loses quality as the binder breaks down, and loses quality with every backup copy. The benefit of digital for archives is that every copy can be perfect, and all you have to do is back up often enough that you are within the window of the formats still being readable. The other advantage is that storage gets cheaper and cheaper with time-- as the archive gets bigger, it doesn't cost you any more to back up the whole thing (probably less).

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[bitingduck]

Humidity of the storage environment matters, too. IIRC, the worst of the bad binders took up a lot of water and expanded as it went bad.

There are probably still a fair number of people with decks and baking setups that are already built and debugged who will do it for a reasonable price. I had mine done about 10 years ago, and the guy doing it turned out to be an Otari rep who had a house full of old machines and every conceivable head block, as well as a baking setup he'd debugged. I think it was about $50/hour then, which was fine because I didn't have that many tapes to do, and they came out great.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[dbIII]

You've missed the point which is that analog is better than totally undocumented digital.

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[afidel]

Man, the poor drum and bass guys, they get to pick between severely rolled off bass drums or eviscerated cymbals, I guess that's why they almost all work in the digital domain.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[roc97007]

but that digital recording and mixing often loses information to compression or inadequate sampling.

That's all on the producer and recording techniques, not the format itself.

That is true. This could be yet another case of "blaming the tool". Yet it's so of ten the case that digital recordings just don't measure up.

Hm. It's like the studios are afraid of studio-class digital recordings being released in the wild. Perhaps copying fears?

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[afidel]

Because the low cost of good digital equipment it's MUCH more likely that we'll have a recording of any given event. That Guthrie concert was probably only recorded by one person because recording was expensive and complicated, today most concerts I go to are recorded by hundreds of people. The likelihood of one copy out of hundreds surviving many years is much better than a single recording surviving and being discovered. As far as formats, it's not like it will take significantly more work for a future archivist to figure out a recording format that it did for the guys recovering that wire recording and cleaning it up.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[mcgrew]

Nope, I tried to find a citation but wikipedia doesn't say how they worked, but one of my undergrad physics classes was about sound, which included how they got four channels out of a single groove. Until that class I had assumed what you assert, but I was wrong. The up and down movements were the mono channel (both channels) and the side to side was a single channel, which was mixed with the mono channel to derive the other channel.

With quadrophonic records the rear channels were modulated with a 44kHz tone and demodulated during playback. Like CDs, these records were limited to a 20kHz ceiling and the difference was obvious; the quad records missed something, the same something CDs lack.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[lgw]

Records are just the anomaly, because they were so popular. Can you think of any other analog format that lasted very long? Not cylinders, not cassette tape, not any of the various video tape formats. Maybe some professional mastering formats? So far, just about everything a CD will fit into will play a CD, so those are doing well. Optical disk may be gone from the consumer world in 10 years, but only because I suspect all physical media will be gone from the consumer world. Consoles seem to be the last holdout.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[Optali]

Well, musicians have no other choice than to be computer savvy or at least file type savvy. It's part of their toolbox mate. Even your average home-theatre owner knows what formats exist, how to convert among them, at what bit rate to encode...

Mate, even the random hip-hop DJ or Angolan Kuduro artists know this stuff...

 

Re: how can you not play an audio file?

[unitron]

Standard audio tape speeds are 30 inches per second and reductions by half, so 15, 7.5, 3.75, 1.875, with that last being the standard for cassettes and 3.75 being the next step up for specialty applications.

3.5 is a floppy size, but not an audio tape speed one is likely to encounter on properly functioning equipment.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[mcgrew]

Cylinders didn't last because platters were superior in every way. Cassettes died for the same reason -- CDs are superior, especially after burners came on the market.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[greg1104]

Good try, but no. Audio on Laserdiscs could be stored in both analog and digital forms, and the digital forms used EFM encoding just like CDs do. Digital audio bit rot on Laserdisc was a subset of the larger laser rot problem, which could hit the format's analog or digital chunks. Bit rot similar to the way CD-R media is corrupted by sunlight became more common near the end of the LD format's lifespan, as higher bitrate digital surround encoding (Dolby Digital and DTS) was used heavily.

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[drkim]

If you are looking for a live music experience, a "musicians sitting in the room" experience, uncompressed digital is the closest we currently have.

Funny you should say that - there have been times when I've been listening to a mix where people were speaking and it seems just like that - kinda spooky, but also cool.

If you want 'spooky,' record digital, 2 ch binaural (dummy head, if possible.) Listen to it back on cans with your eyes closed. Craaaaazy!!

Re:how can you not play an audio file?

[drkim]

...The benefit of digital for archives is that every copy can be perfect, and all you have to do is back up often enough that you are within the window of the formats still being readable. The other advantage is that storage gets cheaper and cheaper with time-- as the archive gets bigger, it doesn't cost you any more to back up the whole thing (probably less).

Agreed! And, getting back to the original article, it's not that hard to pull up your lossless audio file in old format 'A' and click [SAVE AS] lossless audio file in new format 'B' -- on your super cheap storage of course!

"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.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[greg1104]

Anyone who recommends long term storage via analog tape is being incredibly irresponsible. We don't need another generation stuck with tape baking.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[king neckbeard]

He might be speaking of the project files themselves. How long will you be able to use a Pro Tools 11 project file? I seem to recall difficulties with some major DAW in getting files to work on both Windows and OS X.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[hedwards]

Indeed, with digital you've still got bit rot to worry about, but as long as you've got backups, monitor the backups and transfer to a more recent storage medium from time to time, you shouldn't ever be caught in the position of not being able to read the files.

It also becomes trivial to store multiple copies of the same file in different locations.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[Blaskowicz]

But you may be storing digital files on tapes.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[ffflala]

That was my first thought.

My second was that Steve Albini certainly wouldn't be ignorant to these issues. Rather, he probably has a New Jersey warehouse or two of blank tape and unused tape machines that he bought up as manufacturers have dropped off, and is setting himself up for a stable, long term niche market of people who need either tape and/or tape machines.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[Tapewolf]

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.

Depends on the substrate and adhesive. I suspect there are Nazi-era tapes that are still playable (this was certainly the case as of 1991, see 'The Secret Life of the Video Recorder': http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gOULWR4h4Io#t=1017 ...17 minutes in)

There were a lot of problems with tapestock from 1975-1994 which used a synthetic substitute for whale oil. Japanese tapes that carried on using whale oil (Maxell) and formulations prior to this are rock-solid, and Ampex/Quantegy tape from 1995 and later have proven stable to date. When it comes to being able to stick it on a shelf and play it back 20 years later (or in the case of 'Jesus Christ Superstar', 42 years later), digital formats simply aren't in the same ballpark - and I suspect a lot of this is because the density has increased so much.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[BanHammor]

Here's an interesting thing: Cakewalk Sonar records completely in PCM, having a file to write how it all connects and what edits were made to the files. Hardly the fastest format, but it allows for the files in question to be imported (via a sound engineer working for really long) to pretty much anything.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[king neckbeard]

Is the file itself well documented and in a text-based format?

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[king neckbeard]

That could work, although the data used for panning, volume control, and effects would be lost. However, even if that info couldn't be turned into a standardized text-based format, you could have nigh perfect preservation with pre-tracks and stereo post tracks. However, that might be something beyond what is reasonably within the capacity of most engineers. especially if they want other engineers to be able to import it. A standardized project file format, likely using XML, identifying all of the information and automation in a project would be nigh perfect, although I have my doubts that such a standard could be reached among major DAW makers. They want lock-in, and open standards prevent that.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[niftymitch]

....snip.... I get the funny feeling that maybe Albini doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. There are an awful lot of people in music who really don’t understand digital audio and seem to be too afraid of embarassment to ask.

This is likely true but irrelevant to someone busy getting work done.

In the years he has been at it the entire game has changed often.
Yet he has been able to be productive despite the tempest in a teapot
swirling around him.

I happen to know a quality old guy programmer that still used "ed" the
last time I watched him work. You can look at the code text he writes
and it looks no different than text generated by vi, vim, emacs, xemacs,
jove, joe, ...... The point is the result not the tool. In retrospect I have
almost abandoned emacs because it turns my hands into claws suffering from
RSI. I have abandoned editors that demand mice because reaching for
the mouse takes longer than a couple short reach touch typing strokes.
I have a ten year old laptop that still has the best laptop keyboard. I have
a cautiously preserved collection of SUN and SGI keyboards from a time
when the keys were set on a curved correctly spaced base.

A modern band might be well advised to run the analogue tapes through
a high quality A-D process because, well just because.

Again... The point is the result not the tool.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[mcgrew]

Albini has no idea what he's talking about.

Considering that he's an engineer with decades of experience, that seems unlikely. You remind me of a 19 year old classmate in college who questioned the professor's knowledge of the subject, who told the kid "Son, I've forgotten more than you ever learned."

He's obviously done the math. Can you tell a 15kHz sine wave from a 15kHz sawtooth wave? A CD can't, because there are only three samples per crest and almost every teenager can easily hear 15kHz.

I do fault more modern engineers, though. Why does the Led Zeppelin "Presence" LP have more dynamics than the CD does? CDs have a greater dynamic range so someone must have screwed up the remix. Yes, I was disappointed when my brand new CD didn't sound as good as the old LP of the same album. Boston's was so bad the musicians complained. Zappa refused to release a digital version of their Fillmore East album until his deathbed because the quality wasn't good enough for him.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[Grishnakh]

>He's obviously done the math.

No, he hasn't, he's shown you to be someone too dumb to read the article before commenting. He specifically said he didn't favor tapes because of sonic qualities, because he thinks digital recordings won't be readable in the future. This has been reiterated here in the comments over and over.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[king neckbeard]

I'm not sure if that's a good point for comparison, as ed is the standard text editor.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[BanHammor]

Considering that the project file incorporates not just settings from the program itself, but also settings from the myriad of external applications, it doesn't really seem possible or practical to have an open or well-documented format for it. Most likely, updates can and will break it, meaning re-doing mastering, but hey, that's what people usually do when they get master recordings on their hands.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[BanHammor]

I guess there is OMFI still.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[sjames]

That's the thing. With active archiving, digital is perfect since it can be copied over and over without loss. Analog mostly works out better for the found it in an old shoebox scenario.

That may change as analog players slowly disappear.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[brantondaveperson]

In the words on Henry Ford.
If you've always done it that way, it's probably wrong.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[dbIII]

I agree with him precisely because I am someone that reads in digital information from as far back as the late 1960s. In my field the file formats are very well documented and something can be extracted from just about any of those files even with missing headers and big chunks of missing data. Sound recording is not at that point so it sounds fair enough to go with analog if you can't trust that you'll be able to understand the digital format in ten years time when company X goes bust. Some well documented file formats that do everything the people using them want would change that so long as there is universal usage of file formats that are well documented.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[MrL0G1C]

"Can you tell a 15kHz sine wave from a 15kHz sawtooth wave? A CD can't, because there are only three samples per crest and almost every teenager can easily hear 15kHz."

Just because teens (and my old ears) can hear 15kHz doesn't mean that they could hear the difference between a 15kHz sine wave and a 15kHz sawtooth wave, that is something that you'd need very high end equipment in order for the test (of that ability) to work.

I've stopped buying CDs, the cartel is killing the quality with their pointless loudness war. Unfortunately it's not the engineers choice, they'd most likely be out of a job if they didn't ramp up the volume like they're told to.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[AmiMoJo]

Digital data is much less susceptible to degradation than analogue. If the tape stretches the analogue recording plays back out of pitch, but digital data can still be recovered perfectly. Noise is directly audible on most analogue systems, but can be filtered entirely in digital.

In short analogue tapes degrade every single time you use them, where as digital tapes reproduce the sound perfectly right up until they fail.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[mcgrew]

The "loudness war" is an indication of why it really doesn't make any difference, if everything were still analog today's engineers would be making pretty much the same mistakes.

As to having the equipment to play a 15kHz tone, tweeters are cheap, it's the woofers that cost. That's what killed quadrophonic stereo, the cost of speakers (and to a lesser extent electronics). We have surround sound now because they don't use woofers any more; a "woofer" today was simply a large squawker back in the '70s.

Import taxes were the highest cost. I had a pair of speakers with five drivers per enclosure, a 15 inch woofer, two squawkers 6 and 4 inches, a tweeter and a "super tweeter" with a range of 15kHz to 30kHz. They had a response from 10 Hz to 30kHz and a flat response from 20Hz to 22kHz. I got them in Thailand when in the Air Force, the suckers were well over $500 each here but I only paid $200 for the pair. Best sounding speakers I ever heard.

Today those speakers would be worth less because they had a range that modern music doesn't use. Today's engineers would limit response to 300Hz to 20kHz (or less) with the stupid limitations on dynamic range they would needlessly use.

If the sampling rate were higher digital would blow any analog out of the water, but today's engineers don't even try to make a recording of an acoustic guitar sound like a real guitar. Nobody cares about fidelity any more.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[Fred Foobar]

Can you tell a 15kHz sine wave from a 15kHz sawtooth wave? A CD can't, because there are only three samples per crest and almost every teenager can easily hear 15kHz.

Even a teenager cannot tell the difference between a 15kHz sine wave and a 15kHz sawtooth wave. The first harmonic of a 15kHz sawtooth wave above the fundamental frequency is at 30kHz. Please don't tell me that you believe that any human can hear frequencies that high.

Re:"Digital recordings will be unplayable"

[mcgrew]

I'd like to see some studies. An electronically generated sawtooth wave doesn't get that shape by harmonics, although normal sounds do. I don't think the ear discerns the difference between waveforms from discerning harmonics any more than a dog understands the math behind catching a ball. What you say is logical, but I'd like to see the assumption demonstrated using test subjects. Sometimes with math you may get the right answer but missing some variables.

No Analog is not better...

[SerpentMage]

I have this argument oh so often... Analog is not better. The reason why digital can be sucky is due to the resolution. If you want super quality digital audio it will not be a song that needs 10 MB of room. It will be a digital file that probably needs about 500 MB per song. That is the problem, not the underlying technology.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so fraught with unsubstantiated nonsense it makes me ill. Which resolution are you referring to, sample rate or bit depth? Do you know what those actually do?

Sample rate: a higher sample rate allows for higher frequency representation. As in, if you have a sample rate of 48,000Hz, you can play back a frequency of 24,000Hz (already above the range of human perception). Higher sample rate = more high frequencies you can't hear.

Bit depth: higher bit depth increases dynamic range (think: ability to represent *quieter* sounds), and reduces quantization error (white noise). A 24bit CD has a 144dB dynamic range and 1/33,554,432th of the signal will be noise. Even 16 bit (CD) has 96dB range and 1/131,072th noise. Going higher won't make anything sound better.

It is MUCH more important that you have a guitar amp that doesn't buzz, a drum kit that's been tuned well, and a singer that can actually sing than it is to get 'super digital quality.' But please, continue to believe in nonsense numbers like 500MB per song.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[ColdWetDog]

And 5 GB per song is nothing for master files. Hell, that's a few minutes of video. You think you have problems.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti-aliasing filters were a real problem when ADCs sampled at the intended data rate, such as 44.1 KSPS. You had to have something that passed everything up to 18 KHz or so, but was a brick wall at 22 KHz, with no ripples or phase distortion. That was a problem and bad recordings got made.

But ADCs don't work at the sample rate any more - they work many, many times faster which means the analog anti-aliasing filter is trivially simple. Then, before the data even leaves the chip, it goes through a digital low pass filter which constrains the bandwidth to what the output sample rate can support, with far fewer distortions than were possible in the analog realm. That filter is typically built right into the process of decimating the sample rate to the 44.1 or 96 or 192 KSPS output rate.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[Shinobi]

Higher resolution could also be having more channels, like, say, one channel for each instrument

As for sample rate, just because the ear doesn't pick it up per se, you can still FEEL those frequencies, which you'll note if you ever go to a live orchestra. Some pipe organst can go below 10Hz. You won't hear the primary sound but you'll hear the harmonics, and you'll feel the low-frequency rumble. Even with raw digital audio recordings, pipe organs, grand pianos, violins etc are still examples of where even the supposed perfection of digital recording, as claimed by you for example, is shown to be flawed.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[bill_mcgonigle]

And 5 GB per song is nothing for master files. Hell, that's a few minutes of video. You think you have problems.

Hrm; when we have the bandwidth for 5GB songs, sending all the channels and the mix data separately would actually be really helpful for optimizing the playback to the environment. 'One mix to rule them all' is always going to be a compromise.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[EnglishTim]

The tl;dr is 'No'.

The longer explanation from xiph.org

Re:No Analog is not better...

[mcgrew]

I believe they do, quadrophonic records never sounded as good as their stereo counterparts on stereo equipment.

The way they did quadraphonic was to modulate the rear channels with a 40kHz tone and filter out all sound information above 20kHz as with modern CDs. They had the same unnatural sound. All channels were in the audible portion, which was mixed with the rear channels to remove them from the front channels on quadrophonic playback.

I've heard albums through good equipment that if you closed your eyes the band was in the room with you. I've never heard a CD I would mistake for a live performance.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[drkim]

Digital has no problem with low frequencies. High frequencies are what it has trouble with. Digital is better than analog at low frequencies. Your booming pipe organ will have no problem with digital, but the violins and flutes may.

48k samples would not have any trouble reproducing anything a violin or flute could produce.

Please go look up "Nyquist."

Re:No Analog is not better...

[DMUTPeregrine]

Higher sample rates allow higher frequencies, lower stuff should come through just fine.

There ARE some issues with the simple "double the max frequency = sample rate you need" rule-of-thumb though. That's only for a specific type of reconstruction (part of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem) that isn't actually done. So there IS some interpolation error, and how much of it depends on the quality of the filtering in the output stage. In general this is very, very small, but it is present and can be detectable on some (crappy) systems.

The big issue with feeling the low-frequency rumble is that most speakers simply don't move enough air. There are setups to do so, but they're stupidly expensive. There has to be a LOT of sound energy to feel it in this way.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[drkim]

Sample rate: a higher sample rate allows for higher frequency representation. As in, if you have a sample rate of 48,000Hz, you can play back a frequency of 24,000Hz (already above the range of human perception). Higher sample rate = more high frequencies you can't hear.

First, I know *nothing* about audio.

So a question: Sure, there are frequencies humans can not hear. However, in to context of "playback", do those frequecies effect how we hear what frequencies we do hear, eaither due to the audio equiptment (speakers) or interaction with other frequencies?

Just askin...

First: the sample frequency needs to be slightly higher than the frequency you wish to reproduce. (Otherwise you will wind up with alias frequencies.) So 44.1k would easily get you up to 20k. 48k would very handily get you up to 22k.

Second: Humans; perfect, young, humans, can hear up to about 20k Hz. Humans can't hear anything above 20k (although dogs can!) so there is no need to reproduce it.
Women and girls can hear better, longer than most men.
As you age, you naturally lose high frequency hearing.
If you are exposed to *loud noise you lose high frequency hearing. (That "ringing in your ears" after that loud party/concert. Ouch.)
The higher range is not used for the 'notes' of the song, it is just the high harmonics of the instrument that you hear up there. Like the 'sizzle' of a cymbal crash or triangle. The core 'note' (or 'fundamental') of the triangle is much lower.

To most of you, music reproduced up to about 15k would sound pretty good. The extra range up to 20k would just give more 'air' and sizzle to music to a younger and/or female listener.

*Sadly, Sir George Martin is almost totally deaf now.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[kasperd]

As in, if you have a sample rate of 48,000Hz, you can play back a frequency of 24,000Hz

But can you do so reliably? If you sample twice per wave and the original was a sine wave, the values you are going to sample depends on the phase of your sampling. If you are lucky you'll sample the peaks and get alternating high and low values, which would allow you to reproduce the original frequency. If you are unlucky you'll sample zero points and get a zero value at every sample. In general my calculations says you'll end up with with the correct frequency but a random amplitude, which is not very useful.

With three or four samples per waveform you should be able to reproduce not only the frequency but also the amplitude. More samples would be needed to reproduce the actual shape of the waveform, though at frequencies of 20kHz and upwards I don't think you could tell the difference between different waveforms anyway.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[sjames]

A sawtooth wave decomposes neatly into a sine wave of the same frequency and lower amplitude sine waves at harmonics of the fundamental. Since your ear can't hear those, it can't tell a 15KHz sawtooth from a 15KHz sine either. The structure of the ear performs an analog version of the Fourier transform.

What a higher sample rate CAN do for you is allow the necessary low-pass filter to introduce it's inevitable distortion well above human hearing and provide some extra information that might be useful in re-mastering.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[Twinbee]

I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying I've never heard reasoning based on what I've said, or an answer to such things.

I expect to be wrong (as I said in my previous post), but it's mildly irritating how the issue is tucked away, and your post makes things a bit more bitter.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[seebs]

Long story short: No, they don't.

Thanks to modern hardware, we can do the test. No one has yet demonstrated the ability to tell whether an audio sample they're hearing has been downsampled from 96kHz/48-bit to 44.1kHz/16-bit. If you have a converter box inline, and switch it back and forth, they can't tell even whether or not you are switching it between the two modes.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[drkim]

I understand Nyquist, do you understand harmonics and aliasing? The shape of the waveform matters.

Yes, the 'shape' of the waveform is based on the sum of all the sinusoidal harmonics. Nyquist set the sample rate just above 2x the highest frequency to avoid aliasing. Please read up on it...

Re:No Analog is not better...

[evilviper]

As in, if you have a sample rate of 48,000Hz, you can play back a frequency of 24,000Hz (already above the range of human perception). Higher sample rate = more high frequencies you can't hear.

"ultrasonic sinusoids as high as 120 kHz have been reported as successfully perceived."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound

I have to wonder how accurate the anecdotes we get about hearing are... 20kHz seems just too damn conveniently ROUND of a number to be the actual upper-limit. I'm middle-aged and I can hear 20KHz without a problem, though of course I shouldn't be able to do so... Sadly I don't have much in the way of reliable equipment that can substantially exceed 20KHz, so I can't even test the actual limits of my hearing.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[ChrisMaple]

In extraordinary circumstances extreme frequency audio - either high or low frequency - can cause nonlinearities which result in altered perception of normally audible sound. Also, inaudible soundwaves can change effective thresholds, so that a sound that is normally too quiet to be heard might be barely perceptible.

Some of these conditions involve very high intensity sound, risking hearing damage.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[ChrisMaple]

The simple reasoning, which has already been presented in this discussion, is not completely convincing. If you really want to know why it's true, you have to become familiar with Fourier analysis and the proofs and other math behind it. It's not a trivial undertaking, and if you're not up to the task you're better off just believing what signal processing experts say. Sorry, some things just aren't easy.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[ChrisMaple]

Your thinking is correct to an extent. In fact, without compensation, frequencies near the Nyquist limit do suffer amplitude falloff.

Keep in mind that when we're talking about conversion, we're talking about a strictly bandlimited signal. A 23,999 Hz signal can't be turned on and off abruptly because that generates out-of-band harmonics. That inability to quickly change a narrowband fixed frequency signal also means that it's going to be around ffor a large number of samples, and a sample rate of 2.001 samples per cycle will do quite well in establishing amplitude. In effect, it's analogous to the Heisenberg principle, although the underlying phenomena aren't the same.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[BetterThanCaesar]

No, that's not how it works. You still get aliasing – unless you lowpass filter the signal before sampling it.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[Alioth]

I'd like to see that demonstrated, hearing 20kHz at any age is pretty unusual.

I have a function generator at home, I've occasionally hooked it up to good headphones, set it to sine and turned the knob without looking at it until I could not hear the tone (and then done it in the other direction, just to make sure). About 3 years ago I could get to 17kHz (late 30s) but now that's down to 14.5kHz.

You're unfortunately probably just hearing harmonics tricking you into thinking you can go that high if you've not tested with a pure sine wave and headphones good enough to reproduce it.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[HonIsCool]

Well, what you wrote is based on ignorance of signal processing (don't worry, I'm at best a dilettante myself!)

The basic waveform is, per Fourier analysis, a sine wave. Any other waveform is composed of a fundamental sine wave plus higher frequency sine waves. A perfect square wave requires composition of an infinite number of sine waves, and hence also requires an infinite bandwidth and as such is not physically realizable!

When human hearing is stated as being capable of recognizing frequencies up to 20kHz, the waveform is implicitly a sine wave. It's not possible to hear a 20kHz square wave, because what makes it a square wave is the addition of higher frequency sine waves which are inaudible.

Nyquist's sampling theorem, on which digital audio is based, states that to perfectly reconstruct a band-limited signal, the sampling frequency must be at least twice the highest frequency component[*] of the signal. That means that to capture a 20kHz band-limited signal, it is necessary that the sampling frequency be above 40kHz, but if this is fullfilled, a 20kHz sine wave can be perfectly reconstructed! However, a 20kHz square wave _cannot_ be captured without aliasing because of the higher frequency sine waves present, it is in fact not band-limited to 20kHz!

[*] Actually the Nyquist theorem really states that the sampling frequency must be at least twice the bandwidth of the signal. It's possible to perfectly sample a single 20Khz sine wave with a much, much lower sampling frequency, but the signal will be folded down, which is not actually destructive as long as there aren't other frequency components interfering. This form is known as "undersampling" and is used in some radio receivers to down-convert the signal.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[marcello_dl]

> if you have a sample rate of 48,000Hz, you can play back a frequency of 24,000Hz

you can play back AT MOST a frequency of 24,000hz, so your representation will be distorted. Luckily this doesn't have much of an impact, but it would sure be nice to have a 96khz audio chain (from AD conversion to speakers) and see if it's worth the effort. This yet doesn't generate 500MB files so I tend to agree with your post in general.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[Twinbee]

Thanks. Yeah the unheard overtones of 22khz square wave makes sense.

However, a while back, I created the equivalent of a square wave (well, say 1000 partials worth), but randomly off-setted the phases of all the frequencies. So in principle, it should sound the same, but didn't. There was a similar but discernible difference between these two theoretically 'identical' waves.

That leads me to believe it's not just the frequency content of the wave that makes a difference to what we hear, but also the basic shape.

Of course, maybe that was poor speakers/sound hardware though...

Re:No Analog is not better...

[mcgrew]

I have read up on it, Nyquist doesn't stop aliasing, it prevents any tone higher than half the sample rate from recording at all, what comes out is a very audible screech unless frequencies above Nyquist are filtered out. Nyquist explains this mathematically. You can graph it out on paper, the math isn't hard.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[evilviper]

I did test using a (software) sine wave generator, and with hardware that should be good enough to faithfully reproduce it. I don't have an oscilloscope handy to really confirm a pure 20kHz sine wave, but I'll get around to verifying that at some point.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[metaforest]

This!
Hardware PHYS CODECS (ADC/DAC) have gotten several orders of magnitude more accurate and total bandwidth is no longer an issue. At any given Nyquist-sensible sample rate the result is so close to transparent that it is difficult to measure.

The archival is process issue. to keep data accessible you migrate it through the technology via consistent process. You can count on losing archived data if you do not keep it moving up the technology chain using the lowest common format that does not lose data.

We do have some serious issues due to proprietary DAW formats because they encode edit decisions and signal chain configurations in formats that are not standardized and this is where most of the loss of transparency is introduced.

There is simply no excuse for losing master sources, and rendered Two-Track or rendered-N-Track masters anymore. These are easy to keep kicking up the technology ladder. This assumes that producers practice proper processes protecting their assets.

Re:No Analog is not better...

[drkim]

Yes, the 'shape' of the waveform is based on the sum of all the sinusoidal harmonics. Nyquist set the sample rate just above 2x the highest frequency to avoid aliasing. Please read up on it...

No, that's not how it works. You still get aliasing – unless you lowpass filter the signal before sampling it.

So that is how it works. Sorry I left out the LP circuit diagrams and chip pinouts.

Happy to see you read up on it, though. :)

Re:No Analog is not better...

[drkim]

Nyquist doesn't stop aliasing, it prevents any tone higher than half the sample rate from recording at all, what comes out is a very audible screech...

You got it! Exactly!
That "audible screech" is the alias frequency created by having a too low sampling rate. (and too high a freq setting on your high-cut filter.)

Re:No Analog is not better...

[drkim]

So why do you think a 15kHz sawtooth wave should look like anything other than a sine wave once you filter out everything above 20kHz?

Well, it will have it's characteristic harmonic structure (of both odd and even harmonics) up 'til you hit 20k. And trust me, you can't hear the difference.

But, rather than explain why you are unlikely to have people actually playing notes up at 15k (except of course Mariah Carey, who sings up there!) why don't you hear it for yourself:

First, go here and generate a 15k sawtooth (be sure to set sample rate to 48k)
http://www.audiocheck.net/audiofrequencysignalgenerator_sawtoothtone.php
It will create a file you can download on your computer.

Then go here:
http://www.audiocheck.net/audiofrequencysignalgenerator_sinetone.php
and generate a 15k sine (again, be sure to set sample rate to 48k)

Then A/B them on your computer (or high-end sound system if you can.)
[Careful, don't fry your tweeters.]

Please let us know your results!

Re:No Analog is not better...

[drkim]

Exactly my point... mcgrew doesn't seem to realize that the low-pass filter before sampling will remove ALL the harmonics from the 15kHz sawtooth wave, leaving... TA-DA! ... a 15kHz sine wave, which is sampled and reconstructed perfectly by the CD.

I have no idea why he keeps trotting out this "3 crests isn't enough to reproduce the waveshape" crap. The 15kHz fundamental is the only frequency you can hear in that sawtooth wave, and thus the only one you should be concerned about reproducing. You can do that with only 2 sample points per cycle, if your sampling rate is > 30kHz.

Yes, thanks!
I think people get confused that complex wave shapes are really just a sum of a bunch of different frequency simple sines. (Fourier)

Additionally, they also don't realize the difference between the fundamental notes played in music and those much-higher harmonics that make the waveforms. I get the impression from some comments that they think there are people singing and playing guitar notes up at 15k - 20k.

Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[cblood]

If you had a few hundred thousand dollars tied up in analogue equipment you would champion it's "superiority" too. That and resistance to change. Don't get me wrong the guy makes great sounding records. but I doubt if Steve or anyone else for that matter could pass a double blind test and identify analoge from high end digital.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[greg1104]

You really should RTFA before constructing your strawman. "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".

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[jythie]

I would be curious to see more experiments like that actually done. There is actually something to the 'golden ears', a small percentage of the population really does have much finer grained hearing then most people. Unfortunately for every person who actually does have this unusual trait, there (like wine drinkers) probably a thousand people who do not but blindly follow their lead, and probably another thousand who since they can not tell the difference they conclude that there is none.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[rudy_wayne]

"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".

And what about that reel of tape that Albini hands you at the end of your recording session? Where are you going to play that in the future? Reel-to-reel tape machines are disappearing fast because they wear out, break down and no replacements are being manufactured.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[greg1104]

That discussion is already going on in another thread here. This one, anchored with an incorrect "stranded investment" claim, is redundant.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[greg1104]

I can credibly claim to be in the "golden ear" crowd as a former high-end audio reviewer. You need functional ears, but that's more about training than anything else. The better reviewers have spent years of their life carefully listening to different equipment and music, trying to become good at hearing small differences.

There are a few small tricks people usually fall for that good listeners try to get a handle on:

• Louder is better. This one is very hard to isolate out; if you're not using tools like a voltmeter sometimes to match levels, you're being fooled by it.
• More compressed is better.
• Boosted bass and treble is better.
• Familiar is better.

The last one is the most insidious, and I have an anecdote on how deep that goes. When 24/96K digital was first being released for studio use, I sat through a single-blind demo room at an AES show. They played an excellent analog master jazz recording, a version sampled at 24/96, and a version at 16/44.1 CD resolution downsampled via their equipment. I correctly graded the three from better to worse, seemed pretty obvious to me even though the high res digital was very close to the original.

As the presenter worked the room asking people which of his samples A, B, and C were, it was obvious mine was not the majority opinion. There were a few vocal people expressing their opinion that got things completely backwards. They thought the CD quality version was the "best", and therefore it had to be the original master. As this was an AES show, these were people who worked with audio all day, and their preference didn't match reality as I heard it at all.

Listening to their (incorrect) arguments for why they made their decisions, I realized they liked CD quality and its limitations. There was some compression to the CD version and a bit of a fuzzy/harsh roll off at the top end. But it was what they were used to. They thought recordings were supposed to sound that way, because most recordings they listened to did. You can see "familiar is better" in every generation of listener. People who grew up on vinyl like surface noise, early CD listeners are used to terrible aliasing filters, and people who grew up with low rate MP3s like their artifacts. And on the studio side, there are people who like the way analog tape sounds. To be fair, that was better than any digital available until very recently. Recent remasters of old analog recordings are still digging out details you couldn't hear in the earlier digital transfers. I think current generation 192/24 bit digital equipment is more than good enough to replace analog tape though; we passed that point a few years ago.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[bill_mcgonigle]

I think current generation 192/24 bit digital equipment is more than good enough to replace analog tape though; we passed that point a few years ago.

I don't have access to this kind of gear these days, but I can tell you that it shouldn't be surprising. Back, gosh, almost 25 years ago in school, I was doing some audio stuff, both from the CS and the music sides of the house, and it was pretty clear from what we knew about both the anatomy of human ears and the physics of musical instruments that CD and 48K (96K was just starting to show up) was a start limiter and that we'd wind up at 192/24 some day.

IIRC, 192/24 is slightly above the requirements, but it was the next-highest increment that was reasonable to implement.

I'm sure your ears are right - just adding that your experience matches prediction based on physical properties. The thing that surprises me the most is that the same audio format is still considered premium 25 years later.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[greg1104]

The Bob Stuart paper that influenced the DVD-Audio standard hit interesting numbers starting from the ear. I don't think Bob left quite enough margin for error in the equipment needing to be significantly better than what you hear to be transparent though, which is how we got from his 20 bit/58KHz suggestion to need 24/192.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Good point - you have to work in a much bigger space than the final output. But even at that, 58Khz seems too small; it's been a while since I was doing psychoacoustics, but one of the confounding factors was that certain instruments (cymbals, etc.) have very high harmonics, and those can directly vibrate the ear bones in a way that has a different "sound" than the action directly on the eardrum. It's true that an adult eardrum can't really hear over 20Khz, but that doesn't mean that the ear can't sense over 20Khz. 58Hkz would only get you up to about 29KHz - as I recall there is sensitivity up to about 40KHz. It's subtle but measurable. The ear itself is also non-linear and creates higher harmonics, though that effect should be able to be reproduced with loudspeakers (though that gets into the whole problem of how to reproduce the directional aspects of sound with a given set of speakers, of which some high-frequency tricks can be helpful).

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[iksrazal_br]

Oops, posted anonymously.

In front of the gear side by side, anybody could pass a double blind test. On a pancake modern mix, maybe not.

I own 2 digital synths and 6 analogue synths, The digital synths imho are good at sampling instruments like pianos. A recorded real piano vs a digital piano is close. Digital synths like the Virus are all over modern music.

However, in person a grand piano sounds vastly different than a digital piano. My Moog Voyager won't sound anything like my Virus in my home studio, for one thing its rocking the walls even at low volume. On a modern "loudness war" mix though, it often has more than 24 tracks and is using a limiter to pancake the sound so its low-fi anyways. I get fatigued quick and might not even hear the synth parts enough to tell, The new Black Sabbath album is a good example of a pancake mix - everything is the same level throughout the songs - loud!

I play more than record and since I'm the one listening to it everyday, I vastly prefer analogue sound. Like a lot of guitarists I also prefer analogue effects. ymmv.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[iksrazal_br]

To my ears recording to tape sounds way better, even if ironically it ends in a WAV file. I can tell instantly. However, the maintenance isn't worth it to me, tape is a PITA.

I also claim BS on anyone claiming recording above 44KHZ/16 bit, ie WAV, is somehow better. There is no double blind test confirming that, its all marketing voodoo. I have listened to and witnessed countless blind shootouts and the result is the same, people who work in the industry can' t tell the difference.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[greg1104]

Did you miss the part in my little story where I was sad to see all the people in the industry couldn't tell the difference? I find it pretty funny that you're sure recording to tape sounds better first, while rejecting the idea that high res audio matters. If you read a study showing that recording to tape initially was inaudible vs. direct to digital in an ABX test, would you still believe yourself here? The mainstream "it has to be measurable via this test to exist" crowd has a long history of losing to audiophiles. Transistors with flat frequency response but poor harmonic distortion, speakers with flat response but bad impulse handling, and digital with poor clock jitter are all things listeners complained about before they were explained in test results. An ABX test can't prove something is inaudible; it only proves it doesn't seem audible the way the test is setup right now.

That most people don't listen very well, regardless of their career or the skills they claim, is endlessly documented. I can't find the study right now, but I even recall one where it was shown that most people couldn't tell 16 bit digital audio from 15 or 14 bits. I think they tested down to 12 and some people still didn't notice.

This whole area has been beaten up pretty well by 24/192 Music Downloads...and why they make no sense. The problem with that whole article is that it presumes perfect equipment, dithering, and recording practice. What 30 years of crappy sounding CDs have shown us is that none of those things consistently happen, because record companies spew out whatever half-assed reissue garbage they think they can get away with. Perfectly made CD audio sounds excellent, but there are so many examples of less than perfectly made ones.

I suspect that the main reason 24/192 recordings sound better is that it assures a baseline high quality of equipment was used, and there's a very large margin for error while still capturing everything. All sorts of mistakes are absorbed by the medium. Also, asking for a 24/192 recording states a preference--that the consumer wants the audio without the excessive compression or other processing. Trent Reznor was just in the news for offering regular and "audiophile" versions of his new record; that's the same sort of distinction people asking for 24/192 recordings are saying they prefer over the mainstream CD quality version.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[cblood]

I was not talking about synths at all. I was comparing using microphones with digital vs analogue recording equiptment

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[Chrontius]

I'm a golden ear. Xiph talks about how you aren't that sensitive, because if you were, you could hear an incandescent light bulb.

Sometimes the noise floor in my house is in fact set by the incandescent light bulb I'm reading by. It's actually a fairly distracting sound, since it brings to mind a mosquito buzzing around. Back in elementary school hearing screenings, I was a few notches above (and below) what the audiologist thought was humanly possible. I've taken care of my ears, and every concert I attend, I attend with ear plugs. It's kind of a pain, actually - most headphones cut off at 20 Hz, and take the bottom out of a recording; I've found very few sets that'll go far enough to hear everything - I've got one electronica track with a baseline slightly below 20 Hz, and I can only hear it at all with a short list of expensive headphones - Sennheiser HD-280 Pro, Logitech/Ultimate Ears UE6000, and Bowers & Wilkins P5s are the only three I've tried that bring out that extra bonus bassline, presumably there either to be felt (in a club), or to be heard by us golden-ears crowd.

20 Hz is a damn, dirty lie. I don't know if it's just me, or if it's actually pretty common, but 10 Hz is about right. Dog whistle tones don't really contribute much musically, but if you like electronic, dub step, or D&B, 20 Hz is a liability and many headphone makers will embellish heavily about their lower end. Sure, it might be able to produce a 20 Hz tone, but it'll be rolled off by 30 dB. Here's hoping you can fix that with the equalizer

I'm going back to Head-Fi now. :p

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[mestar]

" It's true that an adult eardrum can't really hear over 20Khz, but that doesn't mean that the ear can't sense over 20Khz."

No, it means exactly that.

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[iksrazal_br]

You do realize when you say, "I suspect" , you might have been spun with marketing voodoo? Without double blind tests I still call BS.

I also claim BS on your digital vs analogue tape argument, there are double blind tests that show a difference. As I said I don't use tape because its a PITA. This one isn't double blind but its easy enough to tell the difference in this example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgH99wyRoVc

Re:Why Analogue? Stranded investment.

[greg1104]

That 24/192 recordings have a higher tolerance for capturing full fidelity even in the face of mastering mistakes is not an opinion. And that was only one of the two reasons I gave for why higher resolution recordings might deliver better sound to the consumers buying them. It's hard to ABX things that are altering how an analog tape is digitized. You need some master tape and an analog ABX box to do that, and the insertion loss of the comparison device impacts the results. I'm happy to accept a computer switching ABX setup as perfectly transparent, but that can't be used to compare analog vs. digital.

You just recommended a video where the person presenting doesn't even understand sampling theory, instead spouting the old "there's space between the digital samples" nonsense as if that matters once filtering is applied. I'm laughing my ass off as you accuse me of falling for BS while sharing that technical disaster.

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:stupid industry know-nothings

[ArchieBunker]

Check out what it takes to read a Cray disk pack from the 1980s. That is the challenge with digital formats. http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[Anonymous Coward]

You are quite wrong. Claude Shannon proved that the waveform is completely determined with only 2 samples per cycle. By "completely determined" he meant that all of the information is available to perfectly reconstruct the singal with no loss. Since humans can't hear over 20kHz, and most of them hit the ceiling much lower, 44kHz sampled digital provides more than enough bandwidth. Analog does not have infinite resolution, nor does it go anywhere near the "Plank limit" as you suggest. The lowest level signals are limited by the ability of the substrate to hold shape/charge and its ability to induce flux in the coils or head. That resolution is measurable and quite a bit less than 16-bit PCM, especially with noise shaped dither. Lots of resources available on the 'net to educate yourself, please seek them out.

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[PopeRatzo]

Apparently, Albini hasn't heard about the troubles studios and bands that existed before 1980 have been experiencing with their archives.

Albini uses analog tape because it provides him with some job security. If you have a 1/2" analog tape recorded on a $20,000 machine, you're going to have to find a $20,000 tape machine to play it back.

The one thing he has right is that those $20,000 machines are usually surrounded by guys who know how to place microphones, how to use EQ and mastering gear. They're usually surrounded by rooms where care has been taken to get good sound.

It's the milieu, not the technology. Albini is a smart guy and an opportunist, but he's also often full of shit.

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[Rich0]

Technically, it does. There are no samples with tape. The resolution of the waveform is limited only by physics... it's not infinitely resolute, but theoretically goes all the way down to Plank limits, far beyond the limits of even 32-bit digital. Tape does add noise. But the noise sounds good. It is no different, however, from an effect.

If you want "good noise" just run your audio through an appropriate digital filter and you can get all the noise you want.

Your signal theoretically only goes down to the time constant of the recording hardware, which I can assure you doesn't have a wavelength comparable to Plank limits. Your tape faithfully records detail at 32-bits worth of dynamic range in the same way that your eyeballs faithfully perceive the light from the cosmic horizon when you look at the blindingly-white sky at night.

A 32-bit, 48kHz digital recording is completely indistinguishable from the original source when perceived by human ears. I'll grant you that the effects of the sampling rate would be noticed by electronic test equipment. You're only going to notice the effects of the dynamic range in a well-designed circuit - 2^32 is a very large number.

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nonsense. And when you say the resolution of the waveform is limited _only_ by physics, you mean it is limited by physics, and physics that does not operate at the Planck level.

Like film grain, ferrite oxide molecules are rather larger than the Planck length. Also like film grain, we don't have individual molecules acting as magnetic targets, but entire crystals which are vastly larger than the individual molecules. The noise that a good studio tape recorder adds will be orders of magnitude larger typically much more than a digital conversion on good converters, but does impart subtle distortion and compression. That's fine, but we can't pretend it's neutral. It's not like an effect at all unless you can opt not to use it.

And for the record, 35mm film was much lower resolution than current 35mm digital, and lower bandwidth, but the grain was irregular. That was also "like an effect" you couldn't get away from.

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[jsepeta]

wow, flutter. yep heard all that. and there are digital tools for removing that from your recordings, or for adding it to digital recordings if you really want your stuff to sound like shitty analog.

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[adolf]

No, it's the challenge with reading from a format used by one very niche disk mechanism for a supercomputer.

It may not be _easy_, but it should be a lot easier to read an RLL hard disk.

Actually, reading the Cray disk was probably relatively easy: It was just MFM.

What format is used by a modern disk? It sure as hell isn't plain-old RLL as I remember it from the 80's. I'm going to guess that reading one and getting data from it is going to be quite the adventure in 30 years.

Time will tell.

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[dave420]

Usually it's the power companies who keep such hum records.

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[tlhIngan]

Like film grain, ferrite oxide molecules are rather larger than the Planck length. Also like film grain, we don't have individual molecules acting as magnetic targets, but entire crystals which are vastly larger than the individual molecules. The noise that a good studio tape recorder adds will be orders of magnitude larger typically much more than a digital conversion on good converters, but does impart subtle distortion and compression. That's fine, but we can't pretend it's neutral. It's not like an effect at all unless you can opt not to use it.

Actually, it's "that noise" that makes Vinyl, Tubes and now Tape "sound better" than digital.

You cannot "clip" a vinyl record, tube or tape. Doing so on vinyl results in an unusable master as it'll never play back properly (or long enough - the bigger the wobble, the less playtime there is). Likewise, tubes and tape apply a compression to the waveform as they approach the dynamic range limit, which introduces harmonics.

Clipping is a solid-state process - introduced by A to D converters, transistor amplifiers, etc. They're really an artifact of digital superiority - that excellent linearity can be had by transistors and digital equipment that they'll easily go rail-to-rail if you push them too far. This is excellent because that's what you want - that the transistor can saturate while amplifying the signal rather than having to build in enough gain by underdriving the active elements to stay in the linear region.

Of course, the BIG problem is the harmonics introduced by clipping sound absolutely horrible to human ears. Like the tri-tone, it's completely harsh and sounds terrible.

The harmonics introduced by vinyl, tubes and tape, however, due to the waveform distortion caused by dynamic range compression, sound more "pleasant" to the ear, perhaps "warmer" (though that can be caused purely by the pink noise). But definitely less harsh and the effect is sometimes desirable, as overdriving tubes and generating those harmonics is often a very desirable outcome for effects - be it vocal or instrumental.

A LOT of work goes into trying to prevent clipping because it sounds so bad, but it's hard because you're forcing a huge overdesign of equipment to handle the out-of-range signals and often more equipment is needed (more amps because each amp block is set to provide less gain to stay away from the rails).

Re:stupid industry know-nothings

[cundare]

Jeez, relax & take a breath. This was just a short fluff piece. If you want to point a finger, point it at Slashdot, which increasingly fails to meet its primary obligation as a news-filtering aggregator. It seems like any kind of silly little thing can become a high-profile /. piece these days.

And, of course, maybe the membership deserves what it gets. Take a look, e.g., at all the self-important, clueless responses from Slashdotter Wikipedia Wile E. Coyotes. An idiotic statement like "A 24bit CD has a 144dB dynamic range and 1/33,554,432th of the signal will be noise" is wrong in so many ways. How many of them do you think even know how to pronounce 'Nyquist'"

As for the issue at hand, here's what I think is a reasonable analysis: Analog tape v. high-res digital files is a controversial topic on which reasonable minds may differ. Most truly knowledgeable people -- e.g., long-time contributors to "The Absolute Sound" -- listening through highest-quality gear (think Focal or Wilson) generally report that 15ips master tape played back on excellent-quality gear matches or exceeds the quality of any of their reference 24/192 digital recordings. Some of the newer tape decks and multi-hundred-buck tape reissues of classic rock albums (e.g., the limited rerelease of "Sgt. Pepper's" on tape) have apparently become sonic standards among the hardcore audiophile mags. Sweeping generalizations are, of course, by their nature conclusory, and there's no indication that Albini is anything other than a stopped clock, but I think that dismissing the possibility that analog tape may produce stunning sound quality is more often than not rooted in the arrogance of ignorance.

Re:Old fart can't let go of his superstitions

[jythie]

The tricky part when hearing advice from experts is it is hard for the layman to distinguish superstition from domain knowledge.

He's a moron

[PhrostyMcByte]

He might be a fantastic audio engineer, but I think his reason for continuing to use analog tape is idiotic.

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" ... Albini feels that analog tape offers the best chance for recordings to survive.

I can't see FLAC losing support for a long long time. When it finally does, the beauty of lossless digital formats is that you can batch-convert your entire library into a newer, better format with a very small script and no loss of quality. Seriously, if you don't have the diligence to convert your music library once every 25 years, do you really think you'll be able to keep a tape from rotting or being accidentally degaussed?

As for tape -- once it's on there, that's it. You can't transfer the audio anywhere else without it being lossy. Audio engineers have been able to transfer older recordings from tape with excellent results so I'm not say it would necessarily sound bad (assuming your tape is still good) but why use a lossy format if you don't have to?

I can only assume his reasoning is for the super-long-term Roland Emmerich future. In 2000 years, some aliens will be digging up a post-nuke Earth and come across a collection of tapes, which will be easy to reverse engineer relative to a digital system's multiple formats (HDD/file system/compression).

This sounds like the classic case of an audiophile finding a way to justify use of an ancient technology, but I don't understand how an actual audio engineer could succumb to such nonsense.

Re:He's a moron

[PhrostyMcByte]

Does FLAC support 24bit/192kHz? If not, it's useless for recording masters.

FLAC supports up to 32-bit @ 655 kHz

Re:He's a moron

[greg1104]

Of course FLAC handles 24/192. So does ALAC. Here's a sample record available in all of those formats. hdtracks is a good source for these too.

Re:He's a moron

[catmistake]

You can't transfer the audio anywhere else without it being lossy.

Very nearly, all art is lossy. A painting fades. Sculpture deteriorates. Dance is never the same twice. The fact that analog tape is lossy, by itself, does not invalidate the medium. Consider that all your backed up digital data is one good EMP or massive solar flare away from being forever irretrievable.

Re:He's a moron

[PhrostyMcByte]

The problem with FLAC is that a minor loss of data can result in an archive that cannot be extracted. A single bit error can result in major lossage. PCM does not have that problem - you only lose what you lose.

I'd say you're doing it wrong, then. I'd prefer to have zero loss of data. Format used (FLAC vs WAV) does not really affect this.

For something you can recover from a 3rd party but would rather not (personal rips), make some parity archives – a few MB for a ~400MB album will let you recover from several errors and still be much smaller than a WAV file. Studio masters should be backed up in multiple highly-reliable places – no excuses there.

That said, I've always wondered why FLAC does not have FEC capability built in. It makes sense for a lossless format to have some support for more reliable archiving.

Re:He's a moron

[kasperd]

That said, I've always wondered why FLAC does not have FEC capability built in. It makes sense for a lossless format to have some support for more reliable archiving.

Such features don't belong in the file format. They should be at the storage layer. Whether they should be in file system or block layer is not entirely settled yet, so you can find implementations with redundancy at either layer. Reliable storage should be the default behaviour provided by the file system regardless of what files you put there. There are people who store files with contents that have nothing to do with audio, and those files need just as much reliability.

Re:He's a moron

[catmistake]

The point is, digital isn't as perfect a solution as everyone seems to assume it is. It's advent in the industry lowered the cost of recording and allowed many records to be made by self-producing artists that would not have otherwise been possible. It has also rid the control room of a lot of engineering headaches... but also introduced some headache causing annoyances. The brilliance of the technology developed by the early engineers, at Telefunken, for instance, is rarely ever matched in the digital audio world. That old tech is still entirely valid, and will be so long as it is hoarded away by greedy collectors, reproduced in modern clones, and zealously sought after by discriminating consumers.

So, in other words, he's clueless

[Zero__Kelvin]

"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."

Somebody should start the Open Source movement!

Somebody should really explain digital to this guy. His delusion that analog tapes will outlive digital content is sad, and represents a serious level of incompetence; I don't care how many bands he has recorded.

Analog lasts longer than digital?

[Trip6]

Huh? The magnetic bits start to lose their little minds after 10 yrs. Yes you need high band width a to d (at least 20 bit) but that is cheap these days. And it all comes down to the speakers reproducing the music since they add so much distortion the original sound is lost anyway.

Re:Analog lasts longer than digital?

[Rich0]

The magnetic bits start to lose their little minds after 10 yrs.

The magnetic bits start to "lose their minds" as soon as they're recorded. With analog every little comic ray particle that hits the tape changes the recording. It just takes 10 years until that adds up into something you can actually hear. If you think that analog is better than digital because digital is quantized, then every one of those imperceptible cosmic ray impacts is utter destruction, since you can't perceive the defects in modern digital audio formats either.

Re:Analog lasts longer than digital?

[TeknoHog]

every little comic ray particle that hits the tape changes the recording

Funny, that.

Re:Analog lasts longer than digital?

[Rich0]

Cosmic rays at sea level? Affecting magnetic tape recording quality? That's utterly absurd. Cite or shut it.

J. F. Ziegler, The Background In Detectors Caused By Sea Level Cosmic Rays, Nuclear Instruments and Methods 191, 419, (1981).

Don't have access to read it myself, but WP and the title suggest that these are appropriate. Certainly there is cosmic ray flux at sea level - WP states, "Cosmic rays constitute a fraction of the annual radiation exposure of human beings on the Earth, averaging 0.39 mSv out of a total of 3 mSv per year (13% of total background) for the Earth's population."

As far as changes to magnetic tape quality - why not? If a cosmic ray strikes an atom that is part of a magnetic domain, there is every reason to think that it will affect the orientation of its contribution to the magnetic field of that domain. You certainly won't hear the effects of a single particle collision, but the argument was that analog was better than digital because there is no limit of quantization. If there REALLY is no limit of quantization then there is no limit to the damage you must consider from a cosmic ray particle. The power of a digital format is that until the damage surpasses some threshold there is no impact to the final read of the data, because it IS quantized.

If you want to talk about scientific evidence, then I'd submit that all evidence indicates that modern lossless digital recording formats are indistinguishable from analog when listened to by human ears.

why not a record then?

[Takahashi]

Saying tape has a longer life is silly. I'd have no idea where to get an 8-track player today even though it's an analog format.

Same with a record player, but I could make one pretty easily. (there's a reason why we shot a record into space instead of a tape)

Really, though a documented and uncompressed digital file, properly kept track of, could last forever similar to a record even if we lost our codecs it would be easy to write a new one.

Re:why not a record then?

[greg1104]

8-track players are easy to find. I have two in my basement, and I was just laughing at one in a 7-11 store last night. The biggest problem with 8-tracks is that the tapes are very fragile. A few parts in the mechanism don't last very long. Maybe 10% of the tapes I try will still play for me.

Re:why not a record then?

[Tapewolf]

Saying tape has a longer life is silly. I'd have no idea where to get an 8-track player today even though it's an analog format.

Same with a record player, but I could make one pretty easily. (there's a reason why we shot a record into space instead of a tape)

Really, though a documented and uncompressed digital file, properly kept track of, could last forever similar to a record even if we lost our codecs it would be easy to write a new one.

To turn your argument around, I've had CD-Rs go bad and those are a digital format... It is worth keeping in mind that archiving something onto tape is a known science, and that 8-track was a cheap, disposable format that no-one ever used for archiving.

There are standard archival formats for tape (1/4", usually 15ips, 2 track, no NR, either NAB or IEC curve depending if you're in the US or Europe). Back in the day this was pretty much the universal format - the album would be mixed to that, the duplication master would go to the pressing plant in that format, when they remaster something from the original master tapes today, the source media will be in that format also. To play it back, you need a machine that runs the tape in front of a pair of coils at a constant 38 cm/sec. Unless the tape is of a type that goes sticky, you should be able to recover the audio, regardless of age, and that is not something you could say the same of for a Protools project on a flash drive.

Re:why not a record then?

[mcgrew]

I'd have no idea where to get an 8-track player today even though it's an analog format.

You don't need a cartridge player, you can respool the tape and play it on a reel to reel. But 8-track tapes sounded like shit and cut songs off in the middle. I never owned one and never could figure out why they caught on, I'd already been using cassettes to record my albums for the car.

Re:Albini the analog snake oil salesman

[CRCulver]

He also produced Pixiesâ(TM) Come On Pilgrim (which in fact inspired Kurt Cobain to have him produce Nirvana's Nevermind). But yes, he does know how to keep himself in the public eye.

Polemical Pontification

[bmo]

I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.

So over the past months there's been some discussion about the merits of lossy compression and the rotational velocidensity issue. I'm an audiophile myself and posses a vast collection of uncompressed audio files, but I do want to assure the casual low-bitrate users that their music library is quite safe.

Being an audio engineer for over 21 years, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. While rotational velocidensity is indeed responsible for some deterioration of an unanchored file, there's a simple way of preventing this. Better still, there have been some reported cases of damaged files repairing themselves, although marginally so (about 1.7 percent for the .ogg format).

The procedure is, although effective, rather unorthodox. Rotational velocidensity, as known only affects compressed files, i.e. files who's anchoring has been damaged during compression procedures. Simply mounting your hard disk upside down enables centripetal forces to cancel out the rotational ruptures in the disk. As I said, unorthodox, and mainstream manufactures will not approve as it hurts sales (less rotational velocidensity damage means a slighter chance of disk failure.)

I'd still go with uncompressed .wav myself, but there's nothing wrong with compressed formats like flac or mp3 when you treat your hardware right

--
BMO

Re:Polemical Pontification

[Karzz1]

I have 3 characters for you. M.D.5.

Re:Polemical Pontification

[bmo]

I have 4 characters for you and one sentence.

YHBT

It was a joke, son.

--
BMO

Re:Polemical Pontification

[Karzz1]

/me hangs head in shame. Here is my membership card. May //DIETY// have mercy on my soul.

Re:Polemical Pontification

[Karzz1]

You have a better way to determine a file is not corrupted? Please, do share.

Re:Polemical Pontification

[bmo]

Don't feel bad. It could be worse. You could have fallen for the 5 year old JerryLeeCooper post I put up the other day.

--
BMO

Re:Polemical Pontification

[Cid Highwind]

SHA-512, obviously. That 1 in 2^128 chance that your file has been randomly corrupted in a way that hashes to the same MD5 sum may be acceptable for a disc of bootleg mp3s, but it's just way too high for professional audio work.

Tape? Sure.

[AnotherBlackHat]

You want to give me a master copy on tape? Great!
I wouldn't say no to CD either, and pretty much any other format or media.

Just be sure there's at least one a digital copy in a lossless DRM free format included in the pile of copies you're giving me.

Analog is not the long term solution

[ctdeneen]

1. Copying from one analog medium to another reduces the quality no matter the quality of your equiptment 2. All analog media decays either by time (the physical medium decays) or by playback (physical contact with head wears it down) That means that no matter what eventually your original recording will be destroyed. However, you can take a WAV file and copy it digitally 1:1 many times. This includes backups and moving to different storage media.

Obsolescence

[bheading]

"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."

The hilarious thing about this is that I don't think anyone even makes analogue tape machines, right now. I checked Fostex, Studer, and Tascam. No tape machines being made.

Given this .. how easy will it be to play an analogue reel to reel tape in a few short years ?

Hell, I currently have no easy means to play my 4-track double speed/dbx cassette multitracks from years ago, and I have to go out of my way if I want to play an LP.

But, I can still access a tar file produced by a machine from 20 years ago, and I'd expect to have no trouble accessing a tar file from 20 years ago. Digital makes it easy to move your data as new technology comes out. Each time you copy your analogue tape you lose some of the original recording.

Re:Obsolescence

[Tapewolf]

The hilarious thing about this is that I don't think anyone even makes analogue tape machines, right now. I checked Fostex, Studer, and Tascam. No tape machines being made.

Given this .. how easy will it be to play an analogue reel to reel tape in a few short years ?

I'd say it's more like decades. I believe Otari are still making the 5050. There are others who are reconditioning older machines (ATR Service for one) and the market for rubber rollers and drive belts has become something of a cottage industry. The big problem for manufacturing new decks is that ebay is flooded with the things and that makes it very, very difficult to compete with new equipment.

Then he's just a clueless luddite

[Powercntrl]

Right, just like I can't play old Amiga MOD songs on my fucking cell phone. (that's sarcasm, in case anyone misses it) In the future 3D printing may progress to a point where you can simply replicate a reel-to-reel machine even after they've gone extinct. I doubt that would ever be necessary, though. Even if the specifications of a digital recording format were somehow completely lost, emulation has a pretty good track record for virtually bringing obsolete computer hardware back from the grave.

Now sure, in some post-apocalyptic (zombie invasion, goa'uld attack, natural disaster, etc.) scenario it might be easier to afro engineer a reel-to-reel player, but in that situation there'd be far bigger problems than losing the master recordings of few pop songs. In short, this guy just may be getting OLD.

Re:Then he's just a clueless luddite

[greg1104]

I'm glad to see you're worrying about how fan films might devastate our digital archives.

Re:Albini the analog snake oil salesman

[catmistake]

Butch Vig produced Nevermind. You can easily tell it's Butch Vig by listening to Smashing Pumpkin's Siamese Dream, which Vig also produced. Perhaps you're thinking of In Utero.

A Plethora of Recording formats

[mendax]

I understand why this fellow uses tape. Stored properly, the tape can last for decades. However, there is a larger problem, one that has been in existence since the invention of practical audio recording in 1877. Audio recording mediums as well as their formats regularly change. Let me see how many I can recall off the top of my head (in roughly chronological order):

Wax cylinders
Edison flat disks
The thinner 78 rpm 10- and 12-inch disks that eventually became the standard
16-inch 16 rpm disks that were used by radio stations to record broadcasts
Magnetic wire
Mono magnetic tape (1/4 and 1/2 inch)
Three-track tape (for studio masters in the mid-1950's)
Two-track stereo reel-to-reel tape
Compact cassettes (mono, stereo, and quadraphonic)
33 rpm "long playing" records, the LP made with vinyl
45 rpm "singles", the ones with the big hole in the center
Stereo LP's and 45's
Multi-track one inch tape used for studio masters
Quadraphonic LP's (that's four audio tracks)
14-bit digital recording onto VHS tape
Compact disk (CD's)
Super-audio CDs
MP3, AAC, FLAC, PCM, AIFF, WAV, and whatever alphabet soup of compressed and uncompressed digital audio formats

I've left out most digital recording media for the masters because those can vary widely depending upon the computer system used.

The problem people making audio recordings face should be obvious now.

Recording media (and formats) are going to continue to change as recording technology continues to develop and evolve, and as computer data storage media continue to develop and evolve. In my mind, the only way to make a master recording and keep it fresh and readable is record it digitally at a very sampling frequency and at a high bit rate so the recording resolution is very high, and then every so often copy it to a new recording media. In short, audio recording in a digital world requires the preserver to take an active role in its preservation. So, in my mind, this guy's attitude in recording masters onto audio tape is laudable but probably not practical long-term.

Re:A Plethora of Recording formats

[mcgrew]

Your "Edison" flat disks weren't made by Edison, he used wax cylinders, the gramophone was in existence in 1894 and a turntable you can buy today will play one -- the formats were all backwards compatible; a monophonic record player from 1950 would play a quadrophonic LP with all four channels coming from its speaker.

Until the '40s all records were recorded in one take straight to shellack or vinyl; tape wasn't yet good enough, and wire recorders were not useful at all for music. The grooved platter medium lasted for over a hundred years and hundred year old records are still playable on new turntables.

Likewise, monophonic tapes would play on stereophonic and quadraphonic decks.

Re:A Plethora of Recording formats

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed 8-track. Damn I feel old

Analog vs Digital is only about storage

[BarneyGuarder]

In reality, sound is all analog. Those vibrating strings on that guitar... analog. The vocal cords in the singers throat... analog. The vibrating membrane on those drums... you get the idea. The challenge comes in when you want to store that information so that you can play it back later (by creating vibrations in someone's eardrum most likely). In studio recordings, the limits to the noise floor, distortion, and frequency response is set by the analog circuits unless it is a really crappy system.

Before digital computers were available, the only options were to create static variations in physical media, i.e wax cylinders, vinyl records, magnetic tape, etc. The variations were analogous to the sound waves in the air (hence calling them analog).

Digital sound samples the sound in time and quantizes them so that the can be represented numerically. The beauty here is that the physical medium no longer matters. Once you have the numbers, you could store them on spinning magnetic disks or marbles in shot glasses. The difference is cost and practicality.

There is a lot of information theory to cover here, but the relevant basics are that the quality of the stored digital data (talking about PCM here, compression is an other layer entirely) is how finely you quantize each sample (e.g. bit depth) and how often you take samples (e.g. sample rate). In a well designed digital audio system, these factors will not be the limiting factor of your performance. This was true in the early days of CD audio. The dynamic range of the ADCs and DACs was less than what 16-bit quantization could achieve. Also, the analog anti-aliasing filters of the day could not handle the 44.1kHz sample rate well as they had to have very steep rolloff.

Nowadays, the studio ADCs are capable of greater than 120dB dynamic range (the best datasheet I've seen is 127dB) and oversampling techniques like delta-sigma modulation have made the analog filters much simpler. 24-bit resolution is more than enough to handle this. Higher sample rates were initially to help with the analog filtering, but that does not matter today since almost all audio DACs actually run at several MHz internally and use digital interpolation filters to generate the oversampled data.

So, the theoretical 144dB dynamic range of 24-bit audio is not achievable today and will likely not be for the foreseeable future. Going to 32-bit only makes sense if you already have 32-bit hardware and you don't save any resources by going to 24-bit. There is a slim case to make if you are doing lots of processing, but the advantage over 24 bit is just a practical one in most cases.

This kind of turned into a rant, but there seemed to be a lot of analog vs digital comments and I wanted to try to provide some perspective.

Re:Analog vs Digital is only about storage

[AK Marc]

In reality, sound is all analog.

As is DSL, "digital" satellite (data or TV), and laser-generated 100 GE (or 400GE). The physical world is analog for almost everything. Quantum mechanics excepted.

And the signal to the brain is digital-ish, with your ear operating as a ADC (again-ish). The ish is there because a neuron firing is discrete, but there is discussion on whether all firings are the same, or if there is some additional information stored in the amplitude of the firing.

Re:Albini the analog snake oil salesman

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Albini also used to front Big Black, who, to the surprise of those who now consider him anti-technology, used a drum machine instead of a flesh-and-blood percussionist.

A plea for help

[ioconnor]

I could accept an argument that the only good equipment he has and knows how to work is based around tape. However it seems more like he doesn't know technically how things works and is looking to stir some controversy and learn from the debate that follows. Or I hope that is what he is doing. Somebody pass him a bong and ask him what he is really up to.

The happy day when I ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... threw out the last cassette tape! (The last three cassettes I owned were rare albums I had to import from the UK.) I have not missed magnetic tape at all over the past decade or so. All of my rarities are digital, so I don't have to worry about n-th generation copies of rare b-sides and can make as many copies as I like. I don't have to worry about paying top-dollar for a cassette and having the machine "eat" it (wrap the tape around its mechanism). I have every song I can think of in a device smaller than a bar of soap, where I used to have stacks of cassette tapes. Whatever real or imagined benefit analogue tape offers, it ain't worth it. My digital files sound as good as the radio did when I was growing up. I'll take my chances - I doubt any audio format will come along in my lifetime that I can't convert the FLAC rips of my CDs to with something like k3b.

Digital Fanboys

[wisnoskij]

You realise you can backup analogue files as well? Sure you get into problems when making backups of backups of backups * 1000 (and personally I am not too sure that digital would far any better given the same care given), but that does not mean you cannot have 4 master copies stored in different locations.
And we have no method that can keep a single copy of anything from disintegrating? Sure does analogue tape disintegrate eventually? Yes, but it would probably outlive the average DVD or harddrive.

Re:Albini the analog snake oil salesman

[filthpickle]

His band, Shellac, is pretty good. I like it anyway. And I would imagine that he was asked to do this interview and just gave his opinion. However, he does seem like he really is a knowitall asshole (he would fit right in here), so I won't defend him to vigorously.

Re: Obama Fellatio HQ

[drkim]

wants to bomb a bunch of brown people, just like Hitler,

I believe it was Hitler who was poison gassing his own citizens. So.......

What an odd opinion...

[Goghit]

I've been involved in several backup tape data rescue projects, including tapes that were too far gone to recover anything. No thank you. It's hard to believe a "prolific audio engineer" would miss this point.

I'm currently digitizing a collection thousands of photographic slides, doing individual colour correction on most of them as the dyes have shifted. Most of them have never been viewed more than a half dozen times during their 50 year lifetime due to the hassle of setting up the projector.

  Things I do not miss: film photography, magnetic audio and data tapes, and phonographic records.

Fuck analog. We've lost almost as much to media degradation as we have to DRM and copyright abuse.

don't trust Albini

[globaljustin]

Albini is not a trustworthy opinion on this stuff...

He is a disciplined **studio engineer** but he only worked on *one* national release album after In Utero...because he's actually kind of a douchenozzle...

Here's a post from another thread that gets into detail that I wrote...

The point is, I don't trust technical opinions from people who can't see beyond their own expertise...

Here's a recent interview he gave: http://vishkhanna.com/2013/08/16/ep-24-steve-albini/

He's the bad kind of luddite audiophile...the guy who understand waveforms and shit but really just likes to thrown around their expertise b/c it gives them social power...they always hear things that are 'obvious' that no one hears adn they love it...

Also, this caught my eye in your comment:

You remind me of a 19 year old classmate in college who questioned the professor's knowledge of the subject, who told the kid "Son, I've forgotten more than you ever learned."

and *you* remind me of the old, lazy tenure Prof. who teaches a course on tech business but can't check his own email...

that scenario you present is a common trope of human behavior...just as often that 19 yr old college classmate drops out and starts their own company...

in my experience teaching HCI at WSU-Vancouver I never encountered a scenario like you describe...sure I had 'know it all's' who like to hear themselves be smart...but my job as an educator is to focus that into productive work...

a good prof doesn't need to bring out credentials to sit a sophomoric undergrad down

Sound CIty - Worth a Watch

[Flere Imsaho]

I recommend watching the great docco Sound City. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_City_(film) It's centred around the analogue Neve console that was used at Sound City studios http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_City_Studios to record some seminal albums such as Nirvana's Nevermind, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, among others.

There's some great interviews with artists, engineers and producers, regarding the difference between analogue and digital.

Dave Grohl purchased the console when the studio finally closed, and he gets a bunch of great musicians who had recorded on the Neve over the years, and gets them together to record some new tracks. Paul McCartney, the Foo Fighters, Josh Homme, Trent Reznor, Stevie Nicks, to name a few.

Interestingly, the docco turns out to be more about the people involved than the Neve console.

Re:how can you not play a 9 year old digital tape?

[MillionthMonkey]

I have a dying relative that I visited a few years ago, with a Sony Handycam I got in 2004 that records DRM tapes. After her funeral I dug around in the closet and found a box with the recorder and a dozen tapes. However, Sony no longer supports their nine-year-old camera and doesn't provide USB drivers for it anymore, so the videos are apparently trapped on the tapes unless I can find an old XP system. They can only be watched on the little camera screen, and when it breaks they're gone forever. I really hate Sony.

Re:Trolls trolling trolls

[gagol]

I remember being employed in an agency that specialized in events. At some point we had our first gig where sound had to come out of our computers. The girl that started the project used ordinary pc speakers to mix the sound. After seeing this I went to lunch, and bought a good mixing headphones. The sound was okay on the speakers but sounded like a trashcan being rattled in high quality listening devices. Considering we will have to blast it through many tousands watts sound system for the event, quality was paramount. After that gig, we hired sound engineers for our audio tracks. I got involved in a sound studio as an investor but I am no sound engineer.

so ...

[therealkevinkretz]

His preference for analog tape isn't based on his expert ear or anything having to do with his expertise at all, but with his assumption about the assumed obsolescence of digital file formats? A sysadmin is more knowledgeable on that topic.

It will be much harder to find a tape player for an obsolete format/size of magnetic tape than it will be to write something to convert/decode a file made using a well-documented standard.

what he *says*

[globaljustin]

technically, yes you are "right" that when asked in an interview with a tech magazine, Albini answered as you say...

however, parent is right...Albini is biased by his own expertise...

And his studio went bankrupt... AFTER In Utero...usually people can live for the rest of their lives on residuals from a work that successful...

So the theory that he's pimping 'analog' because of an investment in analog equipment and resistance (or financial inability) to change actually has quite a bit of merit.

Sure, his opinion is noteworthy...but as we note it, we can also disregard it without disregarding his artistic work...

The whole reason he is even asked about this stuff is his connection to Nirvana...and he only worked on one national release album after In Utero...that has to tell you something

Re:what he *says*

[greg1104]

The reason he didn't profit massively from the success of "In Utero" is that he didn't tap into the royalties on the record, which seems a strong part of his philosophy. If you're going to assign some sort of money based bias to the man, the fact that he runs a craft worker style to his studio--charging based on his work, not on the artist's resulting success--could just as easily be a sign of good morals and integrity here.

The argument that analog tape has a proven longevity beyond what's been observed so far for digital media is a simple statement of fact. You can agree with that or feel it's such an obsolete observation that it's irrelevant. But whether the person making the statement has a vested interest in analog tape is not the primary way I think it should be evaluated. There is a clear argument to be made here regardless of whether he has some investment based bias or not.

Re:how can you not play a 9 year old digital tape?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Finding an XP machine, or a VM Machine with USB passthrough shouldn't be that hard. XP marketshare is still 33% or so. It's not like you need to find an 8086 with ISA ports and DOS 3.3.

Does the camcorder not have Firewire capability? Or even composite out? What model is it?

evaluate and disregard

[globaljustin]

whether the person making the statement has a vested interest in analog tape is not the primary way I think it should be evaluated

right I agree...it should be evaluated...

and disregarded...that's your problem...

the state of the art is digital...his statements are 'contrarian' as TFA admits itself

**the burden of proof is on him and you**

and it is foolish not to look at other reasons than the explicitly stated reasons for his opinion

steve albini here

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been through this whole discussion literally too many times to count, so the familiar, "he doesn't know what he's talking about" comments have by now lost their sting. This is my life's work, and I've made a point of knowing what I'm doing and why I do it, but I totally understand why someone encountering this discussion for the first time wouldn't see that. I can refer you all to more detailed discussions of the subject here: http://www.electricalaudio.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12 here: http://www.electricalaudio.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=36367 , and in a dozen or more threads on the Prosoundweb forums like this one: http://repforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/topic,3862.0.html going back at least ten years and on newsgroups like rec.audio.pro and listservs like the Ampex list, Studer list, Chugchanga etc going back longer than that.

Put in as few words as possible, analog masters have proven that they can survive in their original open-format state, with absolutely no attention or maintenance, for the better part of a century, and I'd put money on longer if I could live to collect. Digital audio formats and software are proprietary and prone to change and incompatibility while analog systems are mature enough to have reached a stable, open configuration that allows any engineer to play any tape that physically fits on any machine. I have already seen digital masters of all types become useless while their contemporary analog counterparts can simply be pulled off a shelf and put to work. There is occasionally a hydrolisis (stickiness) problem with old tapes, but that can be remedied by dehydrating and causes no damage to the material recordings.

Yes, digital recordings can be rendered in a way that makes them more likely usable for the next couple of years, and they can be migrated and copied endlessly and other things people always mention, but as a matter of practice, nobody does this, and I can't expect my non-technical clientele to instantly become diligent data-preservation experts. They're dudes in bands, they're just going to put whatever I give them on a shelf somewhere. If they do that with a reel of tape, they have nothing to worry about. If they do that with a hard drive, if the past has taught me anything, it's that they'll have to do a lot of investigation to even find out what they will need to do to open their session, something that may not be possible without the appropriate software, revision, IP protection verification, third-party plugins and fuck me dongles surviving as well. It also should be pointed out that analog masters can be copied onto any digital format you think might survive, and recopied over and over again etc. In any case, the analog master will survive with no attention or special treatment, and that's the sort of thing I'm comfortable giving my clients as the evidence of their lives' work.

I've said all this and defended every participle so goddamn often and for so goddamn long I no longer have the energy to reiterate it all again in detail, but I thought I'd point to more detailed discussions I've had in the past.

Re:steve albini here

[HonIsCool]

Someone forward thinking (obviously not you) will make a cloud storage for digital masters [...]

Cloud storage, eh? That sounds like a super-reliable storage solution, hehehe!

Re:Albini loves magnetic tape

[jsepeta]

Albini hates being called an Engineer. He prefers the term "recordist".

Shellac, his band, takes a bit of listening to get used to. Talented musicians, but angry and drawing on a great deal of angst. He's got a killer mic collection, however, and will pretty much record anyone who will pay him to record their band.

Re:Albini the analog snake oil salesman

[jsepeta]

Butch Vig's best record is probably Garbage - Version 2.0 which still sounds modern as fuck. Nirvana may have changed the world but I'm really bored of their material.

Re:Albini loves magnetic tape

[globaljustin]

Albini hates being called an Engineer. He prefers the term "recordist".

perfect...absolutely perfect...of course he wants to be a called a "recordist" ha!

He's got a killer mic collection, however, and will pretty much record anyone who will pay him to record their band.

yep...I agree there ain't nothing wrong with that...Nirvana probably chose him for just that reason...I certainly love everything about In Utero's sound and his skills in studio were def a big part of it

Re:how can you not play a 9 year old digital tape?

[dbIII]

I installed XP on a new machine just last year FFS. You can use current hardware.

I stick with proven tech

[robbiedo]

Wax cylinders are the way to go. Mary had a little lamb, it's fleece was white as snow.

Albini actually gives a crap

[spineboy]

I saw him when he was plaing in a band called Big Black at CBCGs a long, long time ago. He was a perfectionist then, and you could see him giving it his complete effort. I still think he cares that way about music, and wouldn't do it for mere financial gain.

And digital can be permanent

[Sycraft-fu]

All you have to do is refresh and convert it. So if a new standard is becoming the thing that everyone uses and the old standard is going away, well there will be quite a bit of time when stuff can deal with both. During that time, you convert. You can keep doing this, as often as is required. Same deal with the actual storage medium. In addition to backups, you transfer it to new media periodically.

This isn't theoretical shit I'm talking about either, we do this at work. We have data on our NAS and tapes that originated two decades ago. The original storage devices are long dead but it doesn't matter, it was transferred, and can be transferred again.

So ya, if you have a digital format and you let it sit in a vault for decades, never touching it, then it may degrade and be useless. Of course that is true of anything. Go have a look at the Constitution some day and see the extremes they have to go to to protect it, since age has not been kind to it.

However digital has the benefit of being dead fucking simple to transfer to new media with perfection any time you like. Just do that, and you are good. In fact standards these days are made to make that real easy. Like LTO, any drive must, by the standard, be able to read tapes from two versions prior. So if you buy a new LTO-6 drive, you can load up your LTO-4 tapes, and transfer the data. Then the same deal later when you move to LTO-8. That aside you can go to a completely new/different device just by having them talk over another standard like Ethernet or FC.

I would bet on the long term permanence of digital over analogue any day. Both can be fragile, if you take no steps to protect it, but digital can be perfectly replicated as often as you like, and that gives it a survivability analogue doesn't have.

If you want low frequency, digital is it

[Sycraft-fu]

Digital goes straight down to DC with no issues. The only limit on the low end is that most devices aren't DC coupled, for various electrical reasons, and roll off on the extreme low end. However it is generally VERY low. A Benchmark ADC-1 goes down to 2 Hz and if you want, you can find DC coupled ADCs. Now try and find a microphone that can pick that up, and better yet, try and find an analogue tape that goes that low.

Digital is king of bass and that's part of the reason we've seen an increase in the use of heavy bass in music, is that digital allows for it. You couldn't do it very well with analogue, and not at all with many of the systems (like phonograph).

In terms of high frequencies, well you can record those with digital if you want, we just generally don't bother because there is no point. You can't hear it, you can't feel it, etc. Really, this is something that is pretty easy to test, and indeed has been tested. Our ears don't do that high, we can't hear it.

However it CAN be a bad thing, as what you can get is aliasing. Your gear may not be able to handle those high frequencies properly and your speakers or amp may generate aliased subharmonics that you can hear. So you end up getting distortion, sound that wasn't there in the recording that your setup is playing because it can't handle the ultrasonic content. Hence band limiting can be quite useful.

So digital sound is generally recorded at 48kHz (or 44.1kHz) because there is no reason to waste space recording the higher frequency content, which there is very little of anyhow (look at a spectrograph of it some time if you are interested), cannot be heard, and can cause problems on lower end gear, and even some high end gear.

Problems with recording and reproduction vs reality do not have to do with the digital storage medium, rather they have to do with the analogue recording and playback components (mics and speakers) as well as dealing with placement issues. If you want something that sounds quite real, get yourself some binaural recordings, and some good headphones to listen to them with.

And if you want fun with that type

[Sycraft-fu]

Challenge them to try some ABX testing. They get a recording on their reel-to-reel machine. You then record the output of that with a good digital recorder, like an Alesis Masterlink or whatever. Sync up the playback and have an ABX switch. See if they can tell which is which.

They won't be able to, as the digital recorder will capture everything, including the flaws, of the analogue mater in all its glory. If you play the tape over and over enough to degrade it eventually there'll be an audible difference, but if you make the digital copy and then do the test, it'll sound identical.

Our technology is better than our ears these days. The challenge is in how to capture a good sounding recording, not in how to store it.

Re:And if you want fun with that type

[PopeRatzo]

Challenge them to try some ABX testing.

I've done it. I can record with my Apollo A/Ds and mastering tools and people will think I'm using tape.

Now there are some old consoles and compressors with a very idiosyncratic sound, but nothing that cannot be duplicated in the box.

The difference, I really believe this, is in the milieu of the old-fashioned recording studio over a project studio, not in the gear. Not any more.

You can indeed

[Sycraft-fu]

While it may not seem intuitive, in fact you can. If you want to see it in operation, have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM. You can see perfect reconstruction of sine waves near the Nyquist frequency, and see how things work with real analogue monitoring gear and digital signaling.

We really do understand how band-limited systems work real well, and it really does reproduce sound accurately.

Also, with regards so SNR and sampling

[Sycraft-fu]

We've already gone beyond the ability of electronics to deal with. The 144dB afforded by 24-bit recording is more than we can build converters to capture. The very best will get maybe 120-122dB dynamic range in actual operation (components have more but when implemented in a circuit that is about as good as it gets). At that point, you are dealing with the thermal noise of electrons bouncing around in the transistors, there just isn't much room for improvement with current tech.

That is not to mention microphones which have their own inherent noise. most of them it is 20dB SPL or more. Even the really low noise ones from B&K or the like are around 0dB. Your mics will introduce a noise floor there's no way to get around, unless you increase the volume of the music going in.

And those magical reel to reel tape units? Maybe 70dB SNR, if they are really good.

Albini's experienced opinion is a gold standard

[yusing]

ALL the software - and much of the hardware - I was using 10-15 years ago to craft, record and sounds is long dead ... because of OS and I/O changes. Anything at all proprietary is therefore inaccessible, and much of the hardware is worth a tiny fraction of what it cost. The OSS stuff, on the other hand ... CSound, MIDI, file formats ... remain sturdy and viable.

I'm quite sure Albini remains at the top of his game, particularly including the technical side of the game, and so his opinion will deservedly carry a lot of weight for anyone who doesn't have a recording contract. (Those also have about a 5-year lifetime.) Analog tape remains the only sane archival choice for a 20-30 lifespan, by which time there may finally be alternatives with an even longer lifespan.

How can you not read a Wordstar 1.0 floppy?

[billstewart]

All these mechanisms have their limitations, and if you've ever tried to do real-world data collection from a wide-ranging group of people who have data in random formats, it's a mess. People used to send me tapes in VMS Backup format, or with a duct-tape label indicating which tape it was and an Nth-generation photocopy of what some of the fields on the tape were, or 8" floppies in RSX-11 format. I've got useful data on Sun cartridge tapes, ZIP drives, and several generations of floppies, not that I've got readers for all of them (or ways to plug the readers into my current computers.) My department at $DAYJOB had the last 800-bpi 9-track tape drive in my building 20+ years ago; these days I don't know anybody with a 1600- or 6250-bpi tape drive, though I suspect there are some here in Silicon Valley besides the Computer History Museum and Digibarn.

Data formats rot. Hardware formats rot. The only way to keep the stuff is to keep copying onto newer media, and keep extensive documentation.

Re:How can you not read a Wordstar 1.0 floppy?

[TheRaven64]

It depends on the complexity of the format. I have some WordStar 1.0 for DOS files, and I don't have a program that an open them, but if you look at the contents they're basically ASCII plus some escape characters, and I can make a reasonable guess about what the escape characters mean if I ever care enough to recover the data (since it's school work from when I was a small child, I don't care all that much). If you have set of fixed-size records in ASCII or EBCDIC, they're still easy to decode now even if they were written in the '70s (as long as you moved them onto newer media over the intervening time). If you have PCM data, the same applies: it's a trivial format, so as long as you have the raw bitstream it's easy for someone to reconstruct it. I used to have a Windows 3.11 application that was designed for audio editing, and it had a mode to open files that either had no header, or had a corrupted header, which let you select sample rate, bits per channel, endian, and a few other things, and it would open them: it may take an hour of futzing with settings to work out exactly which data layout you have, but it's a fairly trivial problem.

It's different for film, because getting video down to a manageable size requires some compression, which is much harder to reverse engineer. Fortunately, there are comparatively few common formats for video editing to choose from.

Re:how can you not play a 9 year old digital tape?

[Alioth]

All the Sony Digital-8 cameras I know of have two things:

1. Firewire
2. Composite video out

Firewire cards are still pretty easy to get hold of. Video editing software that reads via Firewire isn't hard to get hold of either. Or you can just use an analogue capture card and the composite video.

Re:Old fart can't let go of his superstitions

[HonIsCool]

I'm fairly sure that Albini hangs on to his analog tapes for sentimental reasons, but you misunderstand one point: he says he prefers to give a band a tape as a master for safety reasons. That means a physical copy that can reasonably ensure the band that down the line they will still have their music. The volatility of a digital file is probably not because he thinks people will forget how to read PCM audio, but simply because the file will easily be lost.

Re: Obama Fellatio HQ

[stealth_finger]

Why don't you socialists try engaging fairly for once? Because you are intellectually dishonest and liars is why. Your arguments cannot hold water, that is why you cannot abide dissent.

Says the AC.

Analog tape to DSD..

[doccus]

Analog tape to DSD is really the cat's ass, IMHO, but sadly, it never caught on. I very much do like the sound of extremely high quality tape. I can't exactly describe what about it makes it more "musical", but then neither can I why "Audirvana" sounds so much better than standard audio players on a Mac either. Problem with Analog/DSD, is once you encode it to PCM, or rip it to your computer, you lose all the benefits. Many less informed listening comparisons of the two formats have , absurdly, got a digital rip somewherein the lineage, which negates the advantage. I would definitely love to use a DSD for multitrack recording. I do not know if such a thing exists however ...

Not trolling, Steve...

[globaljustin]

Hello Mr. Steve Albini AC...I am not trolling...I'm making informed analysis of a music production worker and his best known work. I *do* however accuse you of trolling the whole music industry...

If you want more proof of what you did, go to this comment:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4182985&cid=44792099

I linked to it in the post you replied to, but from the text of your response it seems you didn't look at it.

I *do* think there is plenty of evidence from your own interviews to surmise that you were angry that you didn't take points, and that you basically just overturned the board game when it was clear you weren't going to come out as "mr awesome scene guy"...

Working with Nirvana pushed you and showed your failings...you didn't learn a thing from it...

(ps...I *really* think Albini himself may have written this...if not sorry)

inserting himself into...

[globaljustin]

the situation...in a self-aggrandizing, 'look-at-how-punk-rock-I-am' egotistical way...

Albini can't be both of these things you say simultaneously

when you go to record with Albini, he's _not_ the producer; _you_ are.

and

I'm pretty much convinced that he was just fighting against the label interferring with the band's artistic vision.

So is he 'just about the recording' or is he the kind that inserts himself into non-existent 'big label battles'?

If Albini was a pure engineer, why why why did he ever, ever ever have any involvement with dealings between the Band and *their* people?

He's a curmudgeon...and got way involved in dealings that were not his business

Re:how can you not play a 9 year old digital tape?

[unitron]

Do you mean a PC running Windows XP?

Close as Craigslist.

Re:how can you not play a 9 year old digital tape?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Work is still downgrading new machines to XP.

Love & Albini both bad

[globaljustin]

one obviously way worse than the other...

both inserted themselves into Nirvana's business b/c of their own ego

If Albini is the uber-purist and only cares about the music why did he insert himself into Nirvana's relations with their people?

His own ego...IMHO he couldn't process the cognitive dissonance of having his bullshit quasi-scene theories put to the test with a *real* band

His little 'meh I only take a flat fee b/c I'm a purist'

He's obviously the type that does w/e the fuck they want and retroactively cast themselves as the 'level-headed good guy'

He interfered...he butted in and caused problems where there was none all through In Utero's release

just accept the truth and move on....

[globaljustin]

Albini wasn't some shiny knight in white armor protecting Nirvana from the *evil* record label! That is a fiction!

But you say Albini interfered and overstepped his bounds? Yeah, I understand you might feel that way...if you were working for the record company!!

And as your evidence, you present some *fucking dumb* quotation from some Jack Edino who has *absolutely* nothing to do with the band.

You're inventing a narrative to justify your actions retroactively.

You can't trip and fall over your own shoelaces and then afterwards pretend you did it on purpose....

Nirvana was getting pulled in *all* directions but from interviews there is ABSOLUTELY ZERO evidence in the historical record, besides from what you Albini have said and done, to indicate there was a significant disagreement between the band and their label about the album.

Just accept it.

Look, I love that you have nice recording shit and let humble indie and punk bands use it for cheap...but that doesn't make you some DIY punk godfather...that's normal shit that we all do.

Also, I love that you have a consistent sound in your engineering work.

Keep the good stuff and just get rid of this shit about how you fucking saved Nirvana from the evil record companies!

They wanted the masters b/c they wanted to adjust the sound...Nirvana wanted to...not the label...Nirvana....you can't process that b/c it punctures your little fiction-bubble of this big controversy

Just let it the fuck go

fiction not history

[globaljustin]

provide links...

it's well known that the label 'didn't like' the first listen of the In Utero demos...that's it...that's all...that does not justify or in any way prove you right...

you didn't provide 'history' you typed some words in a box...if you want to challenge the accepted narrative you need *evidence*

see, Krist Novocelic lives next door to my cousin down near the Gorge in Southern Washington and Krist told my friend this, personally:

Yeah, Kurt wanted Albini because he knew he would record it how we wanted. He had a reputation as a being kind of a sexist dick, he even had a band called Rapeman. Anyway, Albini was great for recording but couldn't keep his ego out of the whole process after...he kept acting like he was 'protecting' us from the label but they weren't going to force us to do anything. They told us what they thought but after the meeting that was it and we really could still do what we wanted...yeah...fuck we tried not to talk bad about Albini in the press but he just brought it on himself...I had to call him personally to get him to give up the masters

he still couldn't believe the labels were forcing us to do everything....

hey one more thing, sport

[globaljustin]

heh, not being sarcastic you've been a good sport w/ your responses ;)

but this:

And he [Kurt]said, "Well, basically everything." And **at that point I knew that there was something going on** other than them actually being dissatisfied. Like **somebody had put a bug in their ear** about something. Kurt might have been in a vulnerable state at that point - I don't know if his drug use kicked back in or **if he started to fear for his pension or whatever**, I have no idea what happened - but as soon as he said that I realised that there was something up

ok...and this is the close of the matter...

everything between the **_** that I added above is TOTAL FICTION and nothing more than Albini's very biased opinion!

Kurt wanted to fucking **re-do** the album...that is humiliating to egotistical person like Albini...

In that same passage, Albini says Kurt was 'sheepish' in that conversation...exactly! he was getting ready to tell Albini that they were going to remix his album...

Albini couldn't take it...so he fucking INVENTED A NARRATIVE that puts him as the 'level headed punk purist'

that's it...he should be glad Nirvana kept quiet about his douchebaggery...