Digital vs. Analog - Recording

When it comes to the recording process, analog gear will stay with us for a very long time. Even USB Microphones have diaphragms and analog circuitry inside them. And there are a lot of beautiful sounding analog pieces of equipment, especially preamps and compressors, that affect the signals traveling through them in great and interesting ways.

In my own studio, I hardly ever record anything other than vocals and the occasional electric guitar or bass, and so I only equipped it to be able to record one or two sources at a time. I own a few nice microphones and a really great channel-strip, the Portico 5015 from Rupert Neve Designs that recently won the 2008 TEC Award for microphone preamplifier technology, and that's about it.

At the times I attend large recording sessions at outside studios however, I love to use all the great microphones, preamps, compressors and EQ's that are part of most studios' collections of vintage boutique gear. Picking the right microphones and preamplifiers for each instrument as well as placing them in the right locations are some of the biggest (if not the biggest) influences on what the final product will sound like.

I usually don't go too crazy with compressors and EQ's though, only doing minor dynamic leveling and frequency cuts, as I prefer to leave myself more options for the final mix.

All of the above is really only about the input signal chain, and if you can afford it, I think that is definitely the best place in the signal chain to spend money on analog gear. When it comes to the actual recording medium however, things are different.

There are people that love the “warm” sound of analog tape. There are others that prefer the “cleaner” sound of modern Analog to Digital Converters. I don’t have a strong opinion in the matter as I never got to spend any significant amount of time with a high quality analog multichannel recorder and thus only really know the sound of digital recording. What I do know though, is that good multichannel analog tape machines are really expensive. Especially the ones that can handle 24 tracks or more. Additionally, the tape medium itself is getting more and more expensive, because as demand has gone down, the economy of scale no longer keeps the prices down. Many manufacturers have gone out of business and the few that remain serve only a niche market and charge accordingly. Maintenance is another big issue.

Today, even people that totally prefer the sound of analog tape might only use it to record selected elements, such as a drum kit, and when it’s been recorded, they usually transfer it straight over to digital as they listen back. Why would they do that? Well, that brings us to digital recording technology.

The first digital recorders didn’t sound very good. The reason for that was partly because digital storage was expensive, as was processing power, which led to the use of low bit and sample rates, (to use less data) and partly because the AD-Converters were new and hadn’t yet matured as a technology.

Today, these problems are completely solved. Both processing power and storage has gotten many orders of magnitude cheaper, and the AD converters have gotten much, much better. I would say, to the point of being a non-issue. Add to that the convenience factor. Digital copies don’t degrade the way analog copies do. (Ironically, the business end of the Major Label music industry aren’t very happy about this fact as they don’t like it very much when people make perfect digital copies) Digital copies can be edited and processed in ways that are completely impossible with analog. Imagine cutting real tape in order to move an early snare drum hit to where it belongs on the grid, never mind pitch and time stretching technology such as Celemony’s Melodyne software that allows a producer to create harmonies from a lead vocal, change the phrasing, fix the pitch etc, with no noticeable artifacts (as long as it’s done correctly by someone who knows what they’re doing).

And to seal the deal, digital recording technology is so much cheaper than than the analog “equivalents” that it rarely ever makes any economic sense to record analog anymore. Lastly, almost everything that gets recorded (weather to analog tape, a computer hard drive, or with a digital tape machine) will ultimately be released in a digital form, so there really is no escaping it. Sure, there’s a bit of a resurgence in vinyl, but that’s largely a result of a backlash against the industry “loudness wars” - the way that label executives have been forcing mix and mastering engineers to over-compress the dynamic range of CD’s in order to make them “louder than the other guys’ tracks.” And I shouldn’t even have to mention the fact that you can’t upload, download, sell, or share analog music over the Internet.

Audio Philosophy

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