analog vs digital recording

[solderdude]

Here is a video that analyzes the difference between analog and digital recording.

Of course this has nothing to do with sound quality nor the consumer audio reproduction side but the guy in the video above makes some interesting points for the recording side (the creative side)

 

[Tovarich007]

That's always the same old story : analog is better, bla bla bla...
If not for the sound, it's for conveniency in recording, mixing and on and on....
This is untrue, period.

 

[solderdude]

In fact most of the video is not about analog vs digital but rather about workflow and longevity.
Also it is from an 'old-timer' p.o.v. not from a rather new to the business only used to digital workflow kind of production.

Again... this has nothing to do with the playback side of things but the creation side.

It is from a producers/artist viewpoint and while you say 'it is untrue period' he makes quite a couple of compelling points in favor and against both 'tools'.

I posted this video I stumbled on simply because of the viewpoint that differs from that on the reproduction side.
There is merit to 'both' methods in recording and playback for different reasons without going into the 'technical performance' arena which is what ASR is mostly about.

 

[Snarfie]

In fact most of the video is not about analog vs digital but rather about workflow and longevity.
Also it is from an 'old-timer' p.o.v. not from a rather new to the business only used to digital workflow kind of production.

Again... this has nothing to do with the playback side of things but the creation side.

It is from a producers/artist viewpoint and while you say 'it is untrue period' he makes quite a couple of compelling points in favor and against both 'tools'.

I posted this video I stumbled on simply because of the viewpoint that differs from that on the reproduction side.
There is merit to 'both' methods in recording and playback for different reasons without going into the 'technical performance' arena which is what ASR is mostly about.

Inspiring video the guy has fun going the analog working flow way. Regarding old HDD there are USB hard drive interlink cables that can read and write with them.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I don't find any part of it to amount to anything except for one thing. Near the end he talks about perspective and losing perspective. Your perspectives are very different working RTR vs in the box digital. And someone like him is always morphing his perspective learned in the analog world to digital. Someone who grew up with digital only has a different perspective. Some small number will go back and find it fascinating how people used ingenuity to get around limitations of the old way we don't have anymore. Mainly the new way has advantages and creates different perspectives altogether however.

Yes I love old tech too. Love those Nova shows on PBS where they figure out how ancient people did things that from our perspective seem almost impossible given the tech at the time. It seems humans were always pretty smart, and manage to make it work regardless of tech.

Stupid car analogy. Reminds me of old cars vs modern cars. Guys will talk about how it is more straightforward and you can manage to fix them and get them work while modern cars are too complex and some things go out and there is no fixing it blah, blah, blah. Yet modern cars can almost be counted upon to last 300,000 miles while getting to 100,000 miles with old cars was a notable event.

 

[MaxwellsEq]

When digital editing first came in for journalists, quite a lot of the editors found it much harder than using 1/4" tape, chinagraph pencil, razor blades and sticky tape. The ability to quickly rock-and-roll though the edit point by disengaging the pinch wheel and gripping both reels, was fast and effective. It's how I learned to edit. The early digital editing tools lacked this touch and feel experience.

But once you had cut the tape and chucked the "waste" on the floor, it was hard to go back!

Gradually the flexibility and benefits of digital editing became more useful, then networked digital editing made a very big difference to workflows in newsrooms.

 

[Newman]

Transcript;

... some interesting thoughts there.


JSmith

I don't think it's right to print the full transcript, and violates copyright. Pretty sure ASR doesn't want to host copyright violations, either.

Maybe cut it down to a couple of passages that you find particularly interesting?

cheers

 

[JSmith]

Maybe cut it down to a couple of passages that you find particularly interesting?

I've posted transcripts here many times as some prefer to read rather than watch. It's using tools like this, of which there are many;

YouTube Transcript Generator - Free Online, No Sign-up

Easily convert YouTube videos to text transcripts for free online with NoteGPT. Download or copy the transcripts with timestamps. YouTube to transcript for free and read video transcript.

notegpt.io

YouTube Transcript - read YouTube videos

I think it better to provide the full text so the original wording can be understood clearly, rather than an AI generated summary or own summary which may bias or opinionate the intent.


JSmith

 

[antcollinet]

In fact most of the video is not about analog vs digital but rather about workflow and longevity.

IANARE - and I've never used either analogue or digital recording workflows.

But I really struggle to think of anyway the workflow of using reel to reel tape is going to be better than digital workflows. Perhaps I'll have to watch the video.

 

[Petrushka]

IANARE - and I've never used either analogue or digital recording workflows.

But I really struggle to think of anyway the workflow of using reel to reel tape is going to be better than digital workflows. Perhaps I'll have to watch the video.

Get offa my lawn.

What i get from the transcript is he is comparing a mature analog technology with a primitive digital technology.

 

[Waxx]

The trick is to limit yourself to a certain workflow, limit the tracks, limit on how you record, ... A lot of creative people get lost in the enormous amount of options and posibilities that a modern daw has, while they were just looking for a digital tape machine. That is one reason why tape machines (or even DAT machines) are back popular. You can use a daw as a digital tape machine, and quiet a few do that actually, working digital only for recording, but sill mixnig all out of the box because the workflow and creative process is better that way.

 

[MatrixS2000]

When digital editing first came in for journalists, quite a lot of the editors found it much harder than using 1/4" tape, chinagraph pencil, razor blades and sticky tape. The ability to quickly rock-and-roll though the edit point by disengaging the pinch wheel and gripping both reels, was fast and effective. It's how I learned to edit. The early digital editing tools lacked this touch and feel experience.

But once you had cut the tape and chucked the "waste" on the floor, it was hard to go back!

Gradually the flexibility and benefits of digital editing became more useful, then networked digital editing made a very big difference to workflows in newsrooms.

Staying on the journalist theme - typewriter vs word processor. No contest - digital formats win hands down every time when productivity, flexibility, collaboration and ease of use comes into the picture.

 

[Mulder]

I think this can be true for the analog listening experience to, ie vinyl and turntables make the listener feel involved in the music due to the manual process an visual experience of vinyl. Today's streaming can sometimes, for some people at least, feel unengaging and kind of boring. Even the experience of putting a CD i a CD player can be involving compared to streaming making it more fun.

 

[Mulder]

Staying on the journalist theme - typewriter vs word processor. No contest - digital formats win hands down every time when productivity, flexibility, collaboration and ease of use comes into the picture.

Maybe, but that was not his point. His point was about creativity.

 

[solderdude]

IANARE - and I've never used either analogue or digital recording workflows.

But I really struggle to think of anyway the workflow of using reel to reel tape is going to be better than digital workflows. Perhaps I'll have to watch the video.

Get offa my lawn.

What i get from the transcript is he is comparing a mature analog technology with a primitive digital technology.

What he claims is less 'retries' and more 'idle time' between takes due to the time it takes to rewind and reset.
He claims it works for him, what works for him may not work for someone else.
He just explains his experiences and for sure... he seems experienced
With older and the most modern gear and everything that happened in between.

 

[DVDdoug]

I'm not gonna' watch the video...

To some extent it forced you to be more efficient. The 1st Beatles recordings were made in a couple of days and the record was in the record stores about a week later. But by the end of their career when cost was no object, they spent months in the studio, mostly fooling around and burning-through lots of tape.

 

[Petrushka]

I'm not gonna' watch the video...

To some extent it forced you to be more efficient. The 1st Beatles recordings were made in a couple of days and the record was in the record stores about a week later. But by the end of their career when cost was no object, they spent months in the studio, mostly fooling around and burning-through lots of tape.

Kind of like writing books by hand vs using a typewriter vs using a word processor vs using AI.

A lot of money has been generated by AI music, and I expect AI, at the very least, to create a first draft of a best seller. Soon, if nor already done.

 

[Robin L]

Pretty good video. However, it doesn't align with my recording experiences.

I started recording in the late 1980s, the cusp between analog and digital recording. I would edit 1/4" tape of spoken word recordings for KPFA. Those sorts of tapes don't have much to do with what the guy in the video is talking about - the first assignment was to remove "ums" and otherwise undesired mouth sounds from a lecture/demonstration/interview. So that involved rocking the reels, cutting the tape on the editing block and taping the results back together. I also recorded LPs and CDs to reel to reel, left gaps of suitable length, physically edit where necessary and then copy to a digital format on a Beta tape (this is really early digital) for "Music from the Hearts of Space" programs. It was a completely different workflow than the guy in the video is talking about.

My very first recording of music was a demo tape of Renaissance music. I was using a 1/2 track, 1/4" tape at 15 ips. No punch-ins or anything of the sort. Got a DAT recorder soon thereafter. The sound was clearly better, and the recorder was a lot lighter, making it much easier to haul around. A couple of years after that I got a Sound Designer II two-channel digital editor, and I was off and running. Most of what I was recording were concerts - editing consisted, for the most part, of shortening the gaps between movements of pieces of music. Around this time, I also got some work editing recordings that would end up being CDs. Not recorded in anything like a studio (churches for the most part) but requiring close editing. I suppose these edits were something like "punch-ins", sometimes very close edits, like the edits for piano or harpsichord music. But the "workflow" for these recordings involved (usually) making multiple recordings of whole movements followed by recording short passages that weren't properly covered in the previous takes. That's what a producer is there for - to mark down in the score passages that require those sorts of edits.

From what I've read (and observed) elsewhere, this is the technique used for most classical recordings. It all happens in real time so there's no juggling of multiple tracks. And because this technique of digital recording is ideal for classical music the information in the video, for the most part, doesn't apply to recording classical music. The only problem with all of this is that it makes it too easy to make a good sounding recording of classical music, so that there is the potential of a glut of recordings. Which is how things turned out anyway.

 

[MatrixS2000]

Maybe, but that was not his point. His point was about creativity.

The video or the person I referenced? The person I quoted was talking about workflows - that is where digital shines imo. Creativity is available in both analog or digital workflows. One is significantly less user-friendly (analog) when considering the overall workflow.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I'm not gonna' watch the video...

To some extent it forced you to be more efficient. The 1st Beatles recordings were made in a couple of days and the record was in the record stores about a week later. But by the end of their career when cost was no object, they spent months in the studio, mostly fooling around and burning-through lots of tape.

This is the difference as you describe it. One can work that way in digital too. It takes discipline and a philosophy about the work flow. Something a lack of options enforced years past. If you didn't get creative you could not accomplish as much. Now you need to limit options yourself.

Similar idea with those One Mic recordings. Limited post processing and using one stereo mike forces you to be creative as well as forcing a more holistic work flow. Can be more satisfying to work that way and still possible to get good results.