i LOVE movies, but am grivitating far more towards the digital films being done now over traditional film shot ones... hell, with my kid, im REALLY digging the new animated movies out. i think they are blowing away most "real" films anymore.

i know two people with giant ears that said those machines
ruled when they were in good shape.......



be well

- jack

make sure to show him a couple of the classics though
i think walt disney really created some majic - i am in no way refering to the
psycho thing that is now using the disney name..................

really, just those few:
1- fantasia
2- pinocchio

maybe just those two - my bass player's son's were frightened of
pinocchio until they were six or seven.................

be well

- jack

arent they optical? i know it was his mixdown medium... but last i heard his were gathering dust, i could be wrong.

fact is that MOST people are gravitating towards digital because it offers benefits you CANT get from analog and chanign the way they approach the medium to get great results out of it.

and i had one guy recently begging to sell me his 2"/16t... 16 tracks even for ME isnt enough, nor do i really like the sound of analog. it would of been strictly a effects unit at most for me. probalby with a tape loop on its reels over using it as a recording medium.... course i said no way immediately.

ive done analog, i dont want to go backwards here...

i use both......
i have done maybe 2 or 3 records in the past
year that were exclusively tape....
lots more where tracks 1-15 are tape
and others where tracks 1-8 are tape

i've also done a fair amount of stealth maneouvers
with the 2" 8-track while people are working on
logic or pro - tools - randomly throwing some
tape into the equasion................


be well

- jack

Alphajerk,

Well if you are using digital, you've already departed into the realm of ****ty sound quality. I don't know a better way to go backwards than to be satisfied with that digital trailer trash sound.

Digital Sound Quality is thin, weak, brittle...dead...cold

dont cast your lack of talent upon everyone else. i hear TONS of people doing great things with digital every day.... guess they are all wrong too.


fuuck

hell, i can get analog anytime i want... i got one guy practically giving a 2/16 away and i can book a $50/hr analog studer 2" studio 5 minutes up the road ANYTIME I WANT... i have even mentioned to bands lately to see if they want to go record analog. NONE have yet to want to do it.

you are OBSOLETE. ARCHAIC... and INSANE. the world is passing you by and we are just waiving at you throwing a fit like a little 3yo.

Alphajerk,

Yeah, yeah...but apparently you have not read what other posters have said of their shared experience...according to your personal opinion, they are all insane too...NOT.

Hey, if you like truncation, rounding errors, quantization errors, bad filters, errors in the "time domain," and all the rest of the "anomalies" handed out by the Digital Math Scoundrels, all of which put digital sound quality in the ****hole obsolete category, that's fine with me.

Face it man, you invested in junk digital technology that always produces ****ty sound quality, it was obsolete when you bought it, and it's going down in value by the minute.

Johnny, I think we all know by now that you don't like digital.

And that you like analog.

dfegad

I have followed this thread with interest. I have been heavily entrenched in the digital world for some years now (since the Commodore 64), and have some observations and perhaps questions which may be relevant. I would be interested to know if anyone here is using computers for audio at a more 'core' level. My experience is that Digital offers massive potential for sonic 'creation' and discovery of new sound when we start throwing the numbers themselves around.

..tools like MAX/MSP and Csound for instance. Even C++ coding of audio apps from the ground up. Sometimes the sound quality that one can wrest from these tools is quite amazing. I have found that many 'commercial' plugins/DAWS do lack something, a certain dimension, but I wonder if that is because there are limiting factors that are unavoidably introduced by producing software that conforms to certain median standards...eg benchmarks for how 'neutral' a commercial DAW should sound. Don't know.

Simply put, I feel that we are only beginning to discover what great new aural delights are in store for us in our mathematical future. If we allow ourselves to embrace digital as a something new, a complementary, not exclusive, toolset, we can be assured our analogue machines will still have their place.

I'm familiar with how good analogue can sound, but Studers/ Neumanns aside, I, and many others, are just as excited now by the potential that open audio programming environments offer us. They really do offer us something new. One can produce auditory magic in 32 bit tools like SuperCollider, for instance. Quality-of-sound acquisition is a non-issue when the sound itself is ORIGINATED within a 32-bit signal path.

Thoughts?

JG

Everytime you go thru that stinkin' A-to-D and D-to-A process "artifacts" and "anomalies" are introduced by the Digital Math Scoundrels pieces of **** silicon thin wafer sound strangling devices. With digital, the more channels you have, the more the "Negative Cumulatve Impacts" pile up, all you have left is ****ty Digital Sound Quality.

Get rid of all the old school Digital Math Scoundrels with tin ears, bring in some new tech, new tech that might have a chance of getting it right.

And one of the first places to begin is by destroying the crappy CD format with its wimpy 16-bits and lame ass 44.1Khz sample rate which is way too slow to the job right. SACD does sound better, but even it is nowhere good enough.

MPfreakin3 should have been trashed from day one, talk about a sound-killing format, that's a great example of the nice work the Digital Math Scoundrels have done to ruin the sound of music.

The bastard Digital Math Scoundrels deserve the toughest torture that can enter the mind of mankind for the fraud and abuse they have inflicted upon the world.

johnny, you arent insane... you are just an idiot. i would bet you produce crappy quality regardless of medium as i notice your close minded attitude towards this and other remarks. you are obsolete and so is the medium you like.

Hey alpha, well we did try to engage in debate, yes?

C'mon Johnny, it's time for the chorus again...

zip

It is extremely ignorant to refer to the Nyquist Theorm or any other mathematical or physical theorem as wrong. Unless you have a PhD in math or physics, and a lot evidence to back you up. Any Einstein quotes have been severely taken out of context. A sound wave maybe complex, but is incomprarably simple to the kinds of mathematical models Einstein was working with. There isn't anything intangible about a sound wave, and there is no magic involved. I love using tape, it makes things sound incredible, but that's just it, it can MAKE things sound great, because it adds loads of harmonic distortion. I love my tape machine, but high quality digital is an outstanding tool. There is nothing more accurate right now than HD digital. As for your preference, I completely agree, I would almost always rather record on tape, but lets try not to shoot down the physics of the issue, because you may not understand it or the mathematics. By the way, it is no shame to not understand the mechanics of waves completely, this doesn't generally happen until 3rd or 4th year of earning a physics or math degree.

Bart

The ongoing and raging debate of why Analogue sounds so much superior than digital's lame ass sound quality will continue until all the old school Digital Math Scoundrels have been discarded into the rubbish like all the thin sounding, thin wafer silicon **** they produce.

BTW, besides dealing with all those nasty digital errors and anomalies, has Alphajerk used his math skills to calculate exactly when his investment in old, obsolete digital technology will be worthless? Ooops, sorry, Next Gen Chips are on the way along with new formats...Hmmm, I'd estimate that the best he could do with his digital trailer trash sound rig would be to get an eighth of what he got ripped ...I mean...paid for it.

If he waits too much longer to dump it, he'll have to pay someone to haul that garbage away.

OTOH: Digital rigs make great boat anchors.

2" 8 track was created in 1995 - it is now ten years old
it must be heard to be believed - there is nothing like it
massive, quieter than digital at 15 ips, let alone 30ips
the new atr magnetics tape could bring this even further...........

three tape companies will be competing in september - that people would
go through the millions of investment it takes to pull off such a feat............
reveals the opposite of obsolescence - passion

it's also fair to say that alot of this is about both budget and
musicianship - if people can really play and sing or work with people
who do , tape makes
sense, people like burt bacharach and prince only work with tape..........

i haven't heard enough dsd to know what it's about, but i have a feeling
it could be a great lossless editing medium to use in conjunction with
tape - right now it doesn't sound good...............

lots of my clients are people who moan about tape costs, but moan louder
about the sound of their last record which was all pro - tools - pro tools
done in neve rooms , still, that flatness, that 2d thing...............

digital helps me with lots of things
but tape is king...............

be well

- jack

Screw Nyquist and the horse that bastard rode in on, he and his lemming followers have failed to make digital sound as good as the Gold Standard --- Analogue...

Digital has been an outright failure in terms of sound quality after 25 years of band-aides, patches, and wasted efforts by the Digital Math Scoundrels.

The Nyquist lemmings said CD's will be "all you'll ever need...see, we can prove it with math."

Freakin' liars...16-bit ****...crappy 44.1Khz.

These Digital Math Scoundrel bastards with tin ears should all be sent back to the Freakin' Phone Company where they came from.

After being away for a few weeks I quickly logged in to see if my favourite comic show was still running . Pfew, what a relief, it is . But Johnny, don't you go slipping now, it really should have been

Digital is full of crappy sounding MATH Time Smear, terrible Math Rounding Errors, stupid MATH Truncation, and freakin' MATH Anomalies up the ass...

rather than merely

Digital is full of crappy sounding Time Smear, terrible Math Rounding Errors, stupid Truncation, and freakin' Anomalies up the ass...

Missed a few ones there didn't you, so watch out or your rating will fall.

Glad you could chime in with your helpful list of the problems with digital sound quality.

Bash these Digital Math Scoundrel bastards until they get it right.

25 years of their screw-ups is long enough. Fire them all.

Let's affix warning labels on their foreheads by way of permanent tattoo bearing the legend:

Digtial Math Scoundrel---I tell lies!

more dynamic range than 144db? mmm-kay.... considering analog gear hasnt gotten above 120db, that statement cant be true. its the ANALOG section of convertors that hold back the noise floor! and its the ANALOG section of convertors that make the quality or not.


tape decks make great boat anchors.... especially after this tape start fails miserably. tape is going away... and it wont really be missed.

Johnny B I'm confused...why so negative???
If u think about the bigger picture...our technology is just barely new...we're only getting started...look how far it has come already. Surely sometimes u yourself must get tired of baking yr 20 year old tapes b4 u run them thru yr Otari to try and 'rescue' a precious old recording...that IS out what you do sound-wise, isn't it? You ARE an analog guy I take it, surrounded by all kinds of cool old devices I bet. Maybe you have some thoughts on how we can have the best of all worlds...

Jack G

As someone who started out on computers, I can't imagine why anyone would want to go analogue. To me, digital has that full, punchy, clear sound to it... where you can hear every detail in it, and everything can be perfectly mixed and placed.

Granted, I'm quite young, and have grown up with albums that have been almost exclusively digitally recorded... And these aren't mainstream by any means (I mean, how many people have heard of The Eyes of Stanley Pain?), so you can't use the excuse that I'm just listening to crap and have no taste.

To me, analogue just gives everything a dated sound. It sounds like ASS to me. I don't know what the hell you people are on, there's no sharpness and clarity and detail to anything.. Even when listening to my vinyl, it irks me that I can't get as much out of it sonically as a CD. Sure, the bass is hyped a bit more, which makes it sound a little bit different, but I wouldn't say it's "better", just different.

And I'm not even going to get into recording and editing. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who still wants to record onto tape is insane. A small difference in sound (and this whole analogue vs digital debate is practically just anal-retentive nitpicking anyways) is not worth the kind of headaches and effort it would take to maintain and record with an analogue studio, especially when you can record something that sounds 95% the same with a DAW running pro-tools.

And my most important point is that quite alot of the music I listen to would be impossible to make without digital tools and editing techniques. It makes me want to vomit when I think about the fact that some idiot recording engineer wants everyone to do things his way, even at the expense of the kind of art that other people want to make, just so that things can have this "analogue", "warm" sound. Disgusting.

What if someone wants to make cold, harsh, inhuman sounding music?!?! Are you going to tell Autechre to stop, just because their music isn't "analogue" enough? That someone in their bedroom should never try to start learning and experimenting with music because Reason sounds thin and ****ty? If the music industry had that kind of attitude, we'd still be recording on wax cylinders, using sticks and rocks to bang logs.

Nice try at diversion but the major problem with the ****-for-sound digital converters is the digital math schemes which were all half-assed brain farts coming from the Digital Math Scoundrels to begin with.

First they lied and said:

16 stinkin' bits at 44.1 Khz was "all you'll ever need"

Then they stuck a bag on the ****ty silicon and said...

24 bits at 96Khz is "all you'll ever need."

But they still got complaints about ****ty sound quality so then they lied again and said...

24 bits at 192Khz was "all you'll ever need."

Next week it will be some other scheme at some other sampling rate and bit-depth that will supposedly sound as good as analogue....

But given the piss poor track record of the Digital Math Scoundrels and having them always produce ****-for-sound wimpy little silicon chips that all sound like ass....you can never believe these bastards again...

Not unless you want to invest in obsolete digital technology that will be totally worthless in a short time...or...if you are like Alphajerk...like to have expensive, overpriced, boat anchors around

The very best thing to do with *all* digital rigs is take them to the nearest large body of water and throw it in...

If it sinks...you win.

Damn, I must have really awful ears. I mean, all these 16 bit, 44khz cd's I've been listening to my whole life actually sound like crap, and I didn't realize it!

They were never supposed to sound "as good as analogue", though. They were put there because DVD movies use those sample rates. Movies simply use a hell of alot more dynamic range than a piece of music (from conversational dialogue to the roar of an F-16 engine in front of your face, for example), and the extra headroom was a nescessity. Since the technology and standards were being developed for movies, music companies just decided to get on board too, and voila, 24/96 recording was born.

Oh, and don't you dare tell me that the audio of $200 million movies "sound like thin digital crap".

What an awesome life philosophy. If it doesn't cater exactly to my tastes and specifications, it must be absolutely worthless, even if it might have other benefits. I think I'm going to listen to some CD's I own, and instead of enjoying them, I'll brood furiously about how awful they sound compared to real analogue mediums like cassette tapes.

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Recording Standard.

Yeah, I will say many major movies sound like **** compared to great sounding analogue...sorry to disappoint you....

If it was done in digital it sounds like **** when compared to great analogue.

Period. End of Story.

its probably more like 100db with no noise reduction - but i must confess - i don't know
the number - it's as quiet as you'd ever need audio to be - and sonically it is -
in my opinion - peerless - it approaches all of the numbers digital has, but
when it comes to sound......................there is no digital system that can make
that sound - its huge - 3d - jumbosauras


i don't think it will fail - i don't think it will rise again to what it once was in terms
of numbers, but it will exist because people love it, to many people's ears
its still the only way to go - this passion got quantegy back on its feet, and certainly
is present in every talk i've had with mike spitz, i don't know anything about
the dutch people
passion is what made everything great before it was commodified within an
inch of its life - passion transcends obstacles - passion has an agenda
outside the cash register..................

digital's strongest selling point is the cash register - i'm sure alot of people
are building small fortunes right now as the number of studios increases
like a plague...............every decision i've been involved with to use hd has been about budget and time - never the white lab coat speculations !! EVER !!
the height of passionate conversation i have heard in reference to its sound has
been a mild "it's good enough"

tape brings about the klaus kinski fitzcarraldo...........

tape is not going away, thank god, it would be sorely missed -

you could hiccup and forget all of the great records made in the digital world...........
and there are some great ones...... i have at least ten .... and they're gonna be more....
simultaneously, there is a company in germany called speaker's corner that
is right now producing what might be the quietest, most dynamic, pure analog
vinyl i have ever heard - finest reproduction i know of outside the 1/2" master
how ironic, that new vinyl can show the detail in a thirty - year old recording
that people just don't care about now........ it makes most modern recordings
sound like they were recorded with a toy..................


alpha, obviously you are entitled to your own opinion,
but to utterly dismiss the value of tape
and say it won't be missed
is simply wrong

paul mccartney could probably keep it going all by himself...............

be well

jack

i'd say that lucas film thing
thx has made me leave theaters.........
its like a violent ice pick in my ear.....
i have at other times had to put
napkins in my ears with modern movie
sound ultra - digital

yikes!!

- jack

200 million dollars
money validation is the domain of dullards, but the way this culture
is currently structured.................
have you seen troy ?

yikes

Even the digital movie effects look extremely fake...that goes along with the awful, sterile, lifeless, and fake sound of digital that all sounds like ass.

Nihilist,

You apparently missed the point of the continuing sucession of lies and fraud comming from the Digital Math Scoundrels starting with the false claim that 16 stinkin' wimpy bits and the ever-too-slow 44.1Khz was "all you'll ever need."

The Digital Math Scoundrels lies just kept getting "piled higher and deeper" from there.

As for your comment about you having bad ears, I have no advice there. But you may try going into a properly equipped analogue studio and dragging along any piece of **** digital rig you care to name for a shoot-out. Close your eyes and listen, and most likely you will be a believer that Analogue Sound Quality is THE KING.

You are not alone in noticing this, and it's a damnable crime that the Digital Math Scoundrels have ruined sound in this way.