Analog schmanalog

When I first got high quality digital converters in my studio I did a simple test.

I opened a very large song in my sequencer(an amiga with med), it utilized virtually every synth and sound module I had. It all came in on my mixer and I did a basic working mix of it and sent the stereo output two places.

One went to my digital converters and the other went to both my analog tape machines(A revox 1/4" open reel and a NAD VHS recorder(The NAD sounded better)).

Having recorded it at maximum volume on all my recorders I now sat down and painstakingly balanced their output volumes, I'm confident the difference was less than 1/4 db when I was finished. And then I listened.

The digital sounded good, no doubt, but the analog sounded better. The NAD sounded sweet, beautiful, while digital rattles your fillings(quote Steely Dan).

In comparison my expensive digital converters sounded coarse and flat, certainly not a sound I would choose, had it been for how insanely cheap they were.

An analog 8-track studio that is well maintained and used by a pro will have a sound that no digital converter can approach. That same analog 8-track studio will also cost a hundred times more(maybe a thousand by now) to buy and run than a digital 8-track studio(which I almost expect to be included with my next mobile phone).

And in this instance economy wins over sound.



However, I have a dream.
More specifically I have a techno album. One I haven't programmed yet, and not a sound is recorded, but the album is done and it needs one tiny thing -lots of money.

I want to make the worlds highest fi techno album. To achieve this there will be no digital technology involved. The music and sounds will be performed by an excellent studio band simultanously, it will be recorded on analog 24 track tape(by someone who's been doing nothing else for the last 40 years or so) and very little will be overdubbed, there will be no editing, no workstations; no sound will enter the digital domain at any stage. As you may note this excludes samples(though tape-loops will be possible) but it is of no importance.

I believe this will be the worlds first techno album with the feel of humans and not of machines since the early works of Kraftwerk.

I believe the final sound would be lush and sweet like no other electronic record to date.



It is an old dream, I very much like contradictions in art; my life is full of them, even my personality. Thus I feel that art without contradiction is clinical and inhuman. I guess I am a post-modernist, though I would appear to be late.

Anyways
I'll live with digital to the end of my days, hopefully it will only get better.