| Re: Analog vs Digital [message #67265 is a reply to message #65967] |
Thu, 28 April 2011 01:36   |
Adveser
Messages: 434
Registered: July 2009
Location: USA
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Illuminati (1st Degree) |
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Digital just takes a ton of precision, a lot more patience, and a thorough understanding of what you are doing.
I form the opinion that modern recorded, mixed and mastered CD is better than ever. I have quite a few metal albums that are perfect.
Being anti-compression, but pro analogue is a complete contradiction. The idea on a very well made digital recording is to simulate how analog would compress the peaks, maximize the loudness and enable biasing of frequencies. Then you mix everything with it's own space.
When the following things occur, digital is going to sound bad and I don't judge the medium by these pitfalls:
*recording with peaks clipped.
*recording without a pre-amp
*recording without a compressor and hard limiter
*recording without the maximum volume being close to zero.
*recording a single take of an instrument with two drastically different volumes instead of doing two tracks, or any other situation where the volume is not consistent.
I think people forget that the tape itself was a sophisticated set of signal processing being applied to the recording. Treating analogue and digital the same way is a disaster waiting to happen. The physical medium in analog was another layer of modification too that was compensated for.
I think the mixer should be doing all the compression and loudness maximizing on a record though, leaving the mastering engineer's only job to fine tune the EQ and make create the final mixes needed for CD, or whatever else.
http://adveser.webs.com/
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