"Vintage Digital Sound"

[Stiff]

Actually, I think it's only a matter of time before people will start lusting over "vintage digital sound". There have been some indications already, but on a greater scale, 10 years or so maybe.

[dkelley]

yes, how ironic you should say that.

how it works for me is this:

the really good digital gear from 15-20 years ago (as in, really great gear from then that happened to be digital), well it typically sounded great, digital or not. sometimes why it sounded "great" is because of the limitations of the converters back then forcing the designers to pass audio through some pretty intense LPF circuits that cut off audible high end from the signal.

in the case of the better "vintage" digital reverb units for example (like my personal case the ibanez sdr-1000 which is basically the same as a sony mur402 or some model # like that but there's an ancient lexicon unit that has this issue a bit too (yet still like my ibanez sounds freakin amazing)), the unit actually does cut off somewhere audibly below 20khz, and with reverbs that can be an attractive sound. same with my lexicon alex, although it's algos aren't nearly as good in general (but there are one or two great algos in it).

so from that point of view some of the "vintage" digital gear is really good sounding these days.

the bonus? it's typically really cheap since it's specs are actually really cruddy and it suffers from similar lack of high end and so on that analog tape guys were trying to work around for decades before then, so by today's standards they're relatively lofi.

at least that's my personal opinion on the subject and what attracts me to certain "vintage" digital gear.

that being said there was certainly some crap back then too. what make sme laugh is sampler dudes these days looking for low bit rate cruddy samplers because of that "sound" they have that they love. it might be true, but sampling at 8k or 12k is a pain in the ass from my memory of the task and I'd rather screw up my signal on purpose rather than through bad converters, but whatever. that's another example of how old digital gear (in this case junky gear) can be popular today.

but for tracking as a multitrack tape recorder replacement (which the adat was), I'd never look for "vintage" digital gear. especially not adat. ever tried working with a multitrack unit that uses vcr tapes? LMAO what fun that was. ewe. gross. unreliable and pain in the ass when it eats your tape or it's tracking goes to hell.

you know how you're watching a vhs tape on your vcr and at some point the sound jumps down to mono hissy junk and the picture gets fuzzy for a bit? from dirt on the tape or head or wear on the tape or bad spool winding or poor cassette design or random chance? well take that and turn it into 8 tracks of pro audio for a band in a studio that's paying you as you listen back to it turn to digital mush for a few seconds and you'll never go back to adat again :-)

cheers,
Don