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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.")
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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.
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.
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?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
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...
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.
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
He might be a fantastic audio engineer, but I think his reason for continuing to use analog tape is idiotic.
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.
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.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
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...
Can you lend me your 8-track player?
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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.
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.
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.
wants to bomb a bunch of brown people, just like Hitler,
I believe it was Hitler who was poison gassing his own citizens. So.......
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:
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
Thank you Dave Raggett
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.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
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.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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?)
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
I have a feeling you are comparing analog cassette tapes with DAW performance. Well of course, 3.5 IPS cassette tapes suck, nobody is debating that.
But a 30 IPS properly aligned Studer multitrack will have frequency response up through 80Khz and dynamic range greater than what can realistically be achieved on most DAWs.
There are merits to the old way. Wow and flutter and hiss are consumer perceptions based on inferior formats like the cassette tape and vinyl records.
Having said that, on a sub-$250k budget, many DAWs rival cheap all-analog setups.
You have no idea what you are talking about
...
But a 30 IPS properly aligned Studer multitrack will have frequency response up through 80Khz and dynamic range greater than what can realistically be achieved on most DAWs
A DAW at 88.2k samples and 24 bits can record up to 44khz, well above the ceiling of human hearing (20khz) with a dynamic range of 144 decibels (the difference between more-or-less absolute silence and putting your ear next to a 747's jet engine, which would kill you). You can purchase a converter capable of recording at this bitrate/depth for $500. I think the grandparent seems to know what they are talking about.
Now you can say that you might only get a bit depth of 20 reasonably out of a $500 converter but even if it's only 16 bits (an audio cd) you still have 96 db of dynamic range. Analog tape using Dolby-A noise reduction can have a dynamic range of around 80-90 decibels, at very best 6 decibels less than a mere CD (or even MP3!).
$250,000 is a LOT of money to spend in the audio production world. Personally I would much rather spend that on a huge mic locker, top of the line preamps, acoustic treatment etc. Tape is a royal pain - back in the day there might be a room full of people just to operate the tape decks. Now, I can plug my laptop in to my interface, launch pro tools and be up and running within a couple minutes without worrying about alignment, expensive analog tape etc.
magic is magic, though. If it helps your creative process then by all means, enjoy it! however, it seems clear now that digital is superior on a strictly technological basis
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.
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