the importance of analog sound in prog

Dean wrote: As I also have said many times before - audiophilists spent 40 years striving for perfection but when we gave them perfection they didn't want it. If you like what you hear then you have the perfect system for you. That is the be all and end all of it. No better no better no best.

Yeah...I think I mentioned this somewhere earlier in the thread.  Even the advancements in synths and drum machines were driven by musicians seeking more and more perfection.   And I am not sure many from the younger generation have rejected it anyway.   Even though I like a lot of 70s recordings or that kind of recordings, I don't really have a problem with perfectly recorded audio per se and I guess somebody like JS19 actually prefers modern recordings to older ones.  What the older generation wanted when they sought perfect recordings was somewhere disconnected with what they eventually got.  

Some albums are better in vinyl, other in CD or digital formats even from the same period of the same band. IMO Atom Heart Mother is better served on Vinyl and Dark Side Of The Moon requires all of the digital "perfection". And the two albums went from the same producer, too.

Dean wrote: ... that is exactly "it" - the moment...

Edited by moshkito - September 23 2012 at 11:50

JediJoker7169 wrote: Dean wrote: Popular music can handle a greater dynamic range, but the typical listening environment (for popular music) cannot. We don't all sit in the sweet-spot of a purpose-built listening room in subdued lighting and a nice comfy chair to listen intently to every nuance of a recording. For most of us music is the soundtrack to daily life. Even us prog fans will use music as background while we do other things, such as driving or doing homework or just doing the dishes and for that huge dynamic range is a disadvantage. Why make that sacrifice?  I understand the need to compress dynamics in the vinyl mastering process.  But why, other than in the furtherance of transparency, should compression be applied during the digital mastering process?  Why not simply build a user selectable compressor into the DAC, receiver, or preamplifier of all listening systems?  It could even have a preset that matches the FCC mandated compression for radio broadcast.  Or, even better, why not follow the same principle as Dolby Digital Dynamic Range Control? Dolby Digital uses a novel approach to applying Dynamic Range Control (DRC) to audio program material. Rather than compressing the dynamic range of the audio in an irreversible way, Dolby Digital encoders generate compression gain (also referred to as control) words that are carried in the Dolby Digital bitstream. When the bitstream is decoded, the compression gain words are applied to the audio material according to user settings. Dolby Digital decoders can be commanded to provide full, reduced, or even no dynamic range compression at all. This allows end users to adjust the amount of dynamic range compression to suit individual tastes and needs. I'm tired of compromise.  I'm tired of otherwise excellent albums ruined by excessive dynamic compression.  Why should I or anyone else have to put up with it?

rogerthat wrote: You CAN lose more detail in analog because of the scratches and the hissing and all that but you don't in digital, every sound is well separated and clear.  At the most, you may have to adjust the equalizers to push up some sounds you want to hear more clearly. ...

moshkito wrote: Dean wrote: ...  The good news for Prog fans is that we do have discerning artists who do want dynamic range in their albums - what the mainstream artists do is their concern, not ours.   Agreed!   But the main thing here, though, is really not the "range", as it is the music itself. But if the band is already doing what everyone else is doing, they are not progressive and be remembered for long, or considered progressive. Maybe "prog" ...!!!

And it's too bad there were people like Charles Manson ("you can count me out-in-out")

              But, boy, when that lead singer of U2 flashes his peace sign, now that is plastic!

moshkito wrote:   So, the new joke is ... that PA loves to compare Model T's to the Range Rover!

Well, one would imagine something's terribly wrong if people insist the Range Rover is not a car just because it doesn't look like a Model T.   And for the last time, I have nothing against analog or digital for that matter.   My point is simply that many of the complaints made of the digital format itself are questionable because they relate more to the way bands - and not all bands at that, not even close - use the format these days.  I am not sure how many of the older demographic on PA would be too happy to listen to Children of Bodom or Lamb of God even if it was only available in vinyl.  A good digital recording has dynamics, has organic warmth, has everything.  Now if you delve any further into incredibly minute differences, you are basically splitting hairs and are more obsessed with the format than the music itself, that's my point.

^^^  That depends on what you mean by the word 'organic warmth'.   If on a recording, I can feel - as opposed to merely hear - the effect of 'real' instruments like guitar/drums/violin rather than sterile synthesized/processed tones, I call it 'organic warmth'.   There are digital recordings which still reproduce this effect.  It is probably not going to sound the same as analog because the blending, as opposed to, separation of sounds in analog produced a certain rich, dense tone which you don't normally get in digital.  Does that necessarily make it inauthentic, though....because in a contemporary gig with modern mike setups, you are not going to hear that analog-like rich, dense sound, it IS going to sound not very different from a digital recording of such a concert.  It is probably possible to achieve a more dense mix even in digital because I have heard contemporary recordings with such a mix - though not as dense as analog - but guess what, the audience thumbs it down.   They have grown so used to complete separation of different sounds that they think there's something wrong with the recording if it sounds dense.    As Dean said earlier, neither musicians nor audiences seem to know exactly what kind of recording they want to hear.   They chased perfection in the analog age, then imperfection again in the digital age and then they want imperfection with separation, blah blah blah. 

Catcher10 wrote: ^^^ No it depends what YOU mean.....I did not state it, you did originally. I know to me it would have nothing to do with digital recordings. In general most CDs do not depict the sound of an acoustic guitar the way I hear a live acoustic guitar for example. To me the sounds are too connected and there is not enough separation in the different string sounds....the lows are just not the same on CD and the highs can be too shrilly.....That to me, using your word, is organic warmth I get from a well done analog recording.   Where I do think digital does best is on jazz female vocals, when I listen to Diana Krall on vinyl I really enjoy the piano, to me that is amazing. But the vocals I prefer on CD or my Digital files, in this case I do feel more detail comes through as a whole.   So again it has a place in my system and it may not work for all, but for me it does. The reasons why are subjective and I am not going there cause it does not matter.....As it pertains to hi-fi gear and what I use which is all personal choices.   Enjoy the music is the key!

Organic warmth has no formal definition, it's whatever you want it to be. Back in 2005 I recorded and co-produced an album for a metal band, in my version of the final mix I eq'd the drums to capture the nice rounded tone of the drummer's very expensive kit so they sounded just as I had always heard them played live on stage and in the rehearsal room - you could say it was "organic" because it was deep and warm and I'd place the drums themselves on a moderately narrow soundstage (to mimic how they sound live - none of this snare in the left speaker, hi-hat in the right and the toms dancing across the full width of the stereo image malarkey), and I was quite proud of what I'd achieved - it was a natural sound that captured the quality of his kit perfectly (IMO). The only problem was the drummer (a young lad half my age) hated it, it sounded too "prog" to him, he wanted more punch, he wanted the snare to be more "clicky" (his words) and "in your face", reluctant to do that myself I suggested the band took the masters back to the studio where we recorded them to mix them as they wanted them, which they did. Needless to say, I hated the resulting drum sound (which was not quite as bad as the drum sound on Metallica's St Anger for example, but still clean, modern and oh so very sterile). But the band was happy so we self-released that version and all was well. Until someone asked why we used a drum machine when we had a first-class drummer in the band ... Fortunately, (evidently seeing the error of their ways ), after they got signed the band remixed the album again for its "professional" release - the drums are still not as warm and "organic" and proggy as my original eq-ing, but at least they now sound "real".

Edited by Dean - October 09 2012 at 13:56