It's not all done in digital, but most of it is. For one thing, they stopped making tape machines. Compared to digital they were expensive to buy and maintain. Editing was difficult at best, done with a razor blade and tape.
The whole business model has changed with many of the large studios and large recording budgets having become things of the past. Many small project studios have largely replaced what once was.
Digital is cheap, has extensive editing capabilities, and offers many digital effects including the autotune we have all come to expect with no more out of tune notes, etc.
The people that do still use tape may have to hire session players who can play flawlessly on every take, despite great dissatisfaction from the artists in the band. They have to buy expensive analog consoles and outboard effects. It's very high cost and few can afford it.
It would probably be an oversimplification to attribute the move to digital as solely due to better sound quality. The best digital is undoubtedly very low distortion, but that doesn't necessarily make it more musical for every genre.
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Better sound quality, no loss recording medium each copy exactly the same quality, with 24 bit recording you can probably re-create analogue recordings...
Various people have tried to emulate tape with plugins. Of those, maybe this is the best one: Virtual Tape Machines - Slate Digital But, it still not exactly the same.
Neither are the compressors, EQs, reverbs, etc.
And, CPU overloading is still an issue for use of the most sophisticated models. If a plugin is described as for mastering, usually that means that it hogs too much CPU to use more than one instance at a time.
There also are various dedicated DSP boards to take some plugin loading off the CPU, such as these: UAD DSP Accelerators | Universal Audio And they can run some very good plugins, but users still want multiple instances and more than one plugin per track. With some projects running 80 - 100 tracks or more, even the DSP boards can get quite expensive. And despite all this it still doesn't sound exactly the same as analog. Again, maybe someday.
You guys are looking at this backwards: The analog tape can sound better than digital, because it preserves the actual low level information linearly, and can have an extended bandwidth, with at minimum, a softer high frequency roll-off slope, and therefore no pre-shoot, or extended ringing. It is not the DISTORTION, inherent in analog tape, which is enormous, by comparison to high level digital, but for some reason, partially because 3rd harmonic is almost as harmless at 2'nd harmonic when mixed with music, even 3% distortion (the top of the Vu meter or more) is almost not noticed from analog tape.
Yes Hitsware, depletion mode lateral fets would be OK. However, the enhancement mode lateral fets do about as good a job, but with the serious limitation of low Gm. Drives me crazy. I like high current, and it is almost impossible to get from lateral fets. Vertical fets have lousy tempco (as you know) but are also have very low REAL safe area. They are just too easy to blow up, without extensive external protection. Their biggest advantage is high Gm and therefore wonderful peak current capability.
Delta-Sigma are typically linear below their noise floor
sorry John but you really don't get Shannon-Hartley Channel Capacity, its application to mag tape as just another "information channel"?
the noise floor of mag tape is laughably poor compared to SOTA Audio DACs
and for over a decade Atkinson's measurements in Stereophile have shown we can buy Audio DAC with linearity far below the DAC noise floor if you don't trust the chip or Audio ADC/DAC manufactuer's datasheets, app notes
are you holding out for ultrasonic frequencies that can be recorded on mag tape - compared to 96k ADC? - we can go higher when the controlled listening test start to converge rather than the few seemingly still reflecting the marketing preconceptions of the sponsors
sorry John but you really don't get Shannon-Hartley Channel Capacity, its application to mag tape as just another "information channel"?
the noise floor of mag tape is laughably poor compared to SOTA Audio DACs
and for over a decade Atkinson's measurements in Stereophile have shown we can buy Audio DAC with linearity far below the DAC noise floor if you don't trust the chip or Audio ADC/DAC manufactuer's datasheets, app notes
are you holding out for ultrasonic frequencies that can be recorded on mag tape - compared to 96k ADC? - we can go higher when the controlled listening test start to converge rather than the few seemingly still reflecting the marketing preconceptions of the sponsors
If you look at how hard the early digital recordings were compared to protools, then it certainly wasn't for ease of use in the early days!
That SQ is higher with digitial is without doubt, but as part of the creative process you have to come up with the 'sound' you want. And you use whatever muscial instruments you need to do that. If an old analog desk and tape gives you that sound you want, who am I to argue with the artistic intent.
It gets confusing when a band records live to tape, then makes a 24/96 copy to cut the vinyl from, but again I'm not making the music, I'm consuming it.
My music collection, whilst not huge covers nearly 100 years of recordings in pretty much every format there has been (early stuff remastered of course) and I can enjoy all of it. for the music lover life is good 🙂
(currently playing the Dylan 1966 tour recordings, sounding pretty good given their source).
I'm a low power guy, so the current itself is no problem, but the loss
(voltage for drive, channel resistance) across a follower stage is a limitation.
(opting for no 2nd supply. However, based on the tempco alone, I'm a
lateral user. The circuit below transcends most problems ....
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JC, I am with you on comments regarding tape machines. Since 1966, when I swiped my dad's first tape deck, I literally ran into the ground from hard use three machines, the next one always being a better machine than the one it replaced. But let's face it, the tape technology has had its day, tapes are VERY hard to come by, their price will soon make them the highly preferred contraband item and possibly a Mexican tape cartel may appear alongside the drugs.
A modern tape deck equivalent is probably a decent CD redord machine, now that they can offer dfelete and re-recod CDs. Marantz used to offer a very decent machine some time ago, for still reasonable money.
The hard liners, the diehards, myself included, are now equipped with better cassette decks. They have come a long way from being poor man's recording machines to almost as good as typical tape decks. Open reel always beta the cassette decks in dynamic range and especially at the top end clarity, but the humble cassette decks caught up by using Dolby B, C and S, in combination with HX Pro, so high end saturation points with metal tape equal open reel machines at 7.5 ips. Dosen't always sound as good though, but some models actually make it all the way (admittedly, at a price).
A modern tape deck equivalent is probably a decent CD redord machine, now that they can offer dfelete and re-recod CDs. Marantz used to offer a very decent machine some time ago, for still reasonable money.
The hard liners, the diehards, myself included, are now equipped with better cassette decks. They have come a long way from being poor man's recording machines to almost as good as typical tape decks. Open reel always beta the cassette decks in dynamic range and especially at the top end clarity, but the humble cassette decks caught up by using Dolby B, C and S, in combination with HX Pro, so high end saturation points with metal tape equal open reel machines at 7.5 ips. Dosen't always sound as good though, but some models actually make it all the way (admittedly, at a price).
Wrong. I worked at Alesis all through the 90's. I watched digital take over the recording studio. I drank the digital kool aid back then too. Now I know better. You need to actually listen to the tripe Protools cranks out VS analog. You are not listening to the music if you think digital betters analog. I do constantly tell the "pros" they are doing it wrong. Then the cost of tape comes up next in the conversation.
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I once was trained in how to write write things in an objective format. The main rule was to leave out all adjectives, because they indicate the writer's opinions, not the facts. Texts written without adjectives come off as statements of facts, and allow the reader to form their own opinions. And factual presentations are much more convincing to readers than highly opinionated ones. Leaving out metaphors probably helps too.
Don't mean to be offensive here. Just trying to be helpful, just as the training I mentioned was intended to be helpful to me.
Are you joking? Why would you pay for spinning bits of plastic? Sure you can rewrite CDs now, but you can't edit them like tape. The modern equivalent of tape is a decent solid state digital recorder, though for putting together a "mix tape" or something all you need is your computer. You can use high bitrate / long word length formats like 24/96, you can overdub, you can record live, etc. I guess if you want something for the car you can downsample and burn a CD, assuming your car stereo doesn't have an AUX input. But a dedicated CD recorder is obsolete technology.
High quality analog, 15-30ips, 1/2 or full track cannot be matched by digital CD or by Dolbyizing. 24/96K can sometimes compare, but just be close.
Especially if they use audio only CD's which I hear are either being made by almost no one and/or don't work reliably in legacy machines. I have a friend who by coincidence will use nothing else and went into a fit last month when his Denon would not recognize recently purchased blanks. He figured out that recording 10sec of silence on a PC and ejecting it un-finalized makes them work in the Denon, go figure why you would bother.
Why would I pay? Well, standard recording machines can be had for less than USD 100, and in excellent condition, too. Not everybody needs full high tech platforms, even if I myself would probably go for one.
And if a standard CD recorder is obsolete technology, then what is a reel to reel machine? Not to mention turntables ...
For euphonics and other effects like head and roller scrape flutter, head gap resonance etc, sure, digital can't do that except with great effort and cost. It's free on the tape machine.
For frequency response flatness, low distortion, high dynamic range, low noise, the tape is just blown away. So, like with so many things, what you personally like and/or are locked into for some reason, always will be preferred.
Jan
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