Gearslutz.com - View Single Post

paulneedles · 2nd June 2006

It sure would be nice to be able to afford to have a 2" 16 track. But 2" tape is obscenely expensive - to use it on a daily or even weekly basis would be like having 12-year-old malt whisky running out of your bath taps. For the price of a small stack of blank media that is going to wear out over the course of a couple of years you could have bought, well, some really nice gear to say the least, maybe a small house - I don't know why this is even being discussed in the low end forum! 2" tape is about the highest-end, most stupidly expensive studio luxury this side of marble walls, and unless you make a total marketing feature out of it and spend all your time recording well-heeled retro-rock bands and minted audiophiles it's definitely not worth your while. If you dislike digital 'harshness' , a machine with such amazingly high fidelity is unlikely to smooth the rough edges to the degree that you're looking for. You need to work out exactly what you dislike about the sound that you are getting - it could be that converters, word-clock issues, bit depth, mic technique, preamps or any number of other things are letting your sound down. Is it really 'fatness' that you want? you can get that from a cassette 4-track if that's all you want. Or do you just want rid of the harshness? look at your signal chain and your recording technique before you blame it on digital technology, which has the capacity to sound very smooth indeed. Or do you want more 3-D imagery? you can get the very best 3D imagery from an all-analogue set-up, no question, but i would do some heavy research into psychoacoustics at your local library before i considered throwing money at the problem.

Don't get me wrong - I'm an analogue addict. I would say that I much prefer the tape-based way of working - i find that it directs creativity in a more positive way than the endless variations offered by a computer - plus it's got no screen to distract you from your ears! And if anyone could come up with a £400 box that you could run a whole drumkit through and make it sound as good as an overdriven tape machine... I get a lovely sound(to my cloth ears) out of two 1/2" tascam 38s - used-once master reels with the odd edit can be picked up for cassette money, and parts are fairly easy to come by compared with other machines. If you keep a machine like this lined up and clean, and abuse those VUs like Rocky with a cow carcass, you'll get 'that fat analogue sound' and no mistake. And it'll set you back much less than a fancy valve compressor or preamp. And it'll sound way better than a computer plus that if fat and warm is what you really want. But I found after ditching my computer set up to go analogue, a lot of things i'd ascribed as being 'digital' problems were really problems with the way I recorded and mixed things, and specific technical problems with my computer-based setup. So if you have to spend money, be very sure in your own mind why you're doing it, as a lot of people, including me, have wasted stupid amounts of money on trying to achieve 'that fat analogue sound' and then realised that achieving that is almost all about technique, imagination, acquired knowledge, and lateral thinking, and not too much to do with the technology that you're using at all.If you have to spend at all, spend small.

2nd June 2006	#12
paulneedles Gear maniac Joined: Sep 2005 Posts: 175	It sure would be nice to be able to afford to have a 2" 16 track. But 2" tape is obscenely expensive - to use it on a daily or even weekly basis would be like having 12-year-old malt whisky running out of your bath taps. For the price of a small stack of blank media that is going to wear out over the course of a couple of years you could have bought, well, some really nice gear to say the least, maybe a small house - I don't know why this is even being discussed in the low end forum! 2" tape is about the highest-end, most stupidly expensive studio luxury this side of marble walls, and unless you make a total marketing feature out of it and spend all your time recording well-heeled retro-rock bands and minted audiophiles it's definitely not worth your while. If you dislike digital 'harshness' , a machine with such amazingly high fidelity is unlikely to smooth the rough edges to the degree that you're looking for. You need to work out exactly what you dislike about the sound that you are getting - it could be that converters, word-clock issues, bit depth, mic technique, preamps or any number of other things are letting your sound down. Is it really 'fatness' that you want? you can get that from a cassette 4-track if that's all you want. Or do you just want rid of the harshness? look at your signal chain and your recording technique before you blame it on digital technology, which has the capacity to sound very smooth indeed. Or do you want more 3-D imagery? you can get the very best 3D imagery from an all-analogue set-up, no question, but i would do some heavy research into psychoacoustics at your local library before i considered throwing money at the problem. Don't get me wrong - I'm an analogue addict. I would say that I much prefer the tape-based way of working - i find that it directs creativity in a more positive way than the endless variations offered by a computer - plus it's got no screen to distract you from your ears! And if anyone could come up with a £400 box that you could run a whole drumkit through and make it sound as good as an overdriven tape machine... I get a lovely sound(to my cloth ears) out of two 1/2" tascam 38s - used-once master reels with the odd edit can be picked up for cassette money, and parts are fairly easy to come by compared with other machines. If you keep a machine like this lined up and clean, and abuse those VUs like Rocky with a cow carcass, you'll get 'that fat analogue sound' and no mistake. And it'll set you back much less than a fancy valve compressor or preamp. And it'll sound way better than a computer plus that if fat and warm is what you really want. But I found after ditching my computer set up to go analogue, a lot of things i'd ascribed as being 'digital' problems were really problems with the way I recorded and mixed things, and specific technical problems with my computer-based setup. So if you have to spend money, be very sure in your own mind why you're doing it, as a lot of people, including me, have wasted stupid amounts of money on trying to achieve 'that fat analogue sound' and then realised that achieving that is almost all about technique, imagination, acquired knowledge, and lateral thinking, and not too much to do with the technology that you're using at all.If you have to spend at all, spend small.