the importance of analog sound in prog

Yes. Got any?

Surrealist wrote: Can we agree that based upon your recent post that there may be other scientific disciplines that might offer explanations as to the different perceptions that various individuals might have in regard to the varying descriptive experiences of listening to music in both digital and analog formats?

Yes.

 

Listener fatigue does not make you fall asleep, it makes you unreceptive and irritable. According to audiophilists listener fatigue affects your ability to differentiate different formats and sources. I said I don't know why that is, I merely postulated a possible cause based upon the known characteristics of digital and analogue media and the complaints of listener fatigue by people who don't like digital media. I've never experienced listener fatigue so I don't know how it affects me or whether it is a real phenomenon, I can only go by what audiophilists say.

 

Yes a live performance will have more detail, and it will have more detail than any recording not just a digital recording - the question is not of live verses digital or live verses analogue but of digital verses analogue. Listener fatigue appears to be more to do with top-end detail yet the defining characteristic of live performances to me seems to be more about the low-end performance and detail, I've been to concerts where the top-end is too shrill and too loud - it is not a pleasant experience but I didn't get fatigued by it, I just wanted to be somewhere else at that moment.

 

 

And it was just wonderful.....I got up and put the needle back to the start, and it was wonderful again. The sound to me is so much better on vinyl, and I don't have the remaster version. I have a German issue Tarkus album, this is the only copy I have owned....maybe the US version sounds better but I doubt it.

 

The keyboards are simply wonderful, I can hear all the subtle sounds and changes very nicely. The vocals are what I would expect if Greg Lake was talking to me in person, that is the detail I hear.

 

Everytime I A/B this LP with my CD copy, its no comparison....Sure from a convenience and lazy factor I can set the song to endless loop on my CDP, it does sound very good......but I don't get the full experience of the music. As moshkito says since it is about experiencing the music, which I agree, this to me in full force can only happen to my ears and mind with my vinyl.....and I love my digital setup, its excellent to me......but my analog setup is much better.

 

Happy listening!

This is why I avoid subjective comparisons, you can contradict yourself and still make it sound like your prefered medium is better. Either you can hear more detail off vinyl or you cannot - you cannot do both. It is black and white, even subjectively.

 

"Hiss" is high frequency noise that predominately comes from magnetic tape and is due to the particle sizes in the magnetic material. There are other sources of high frequency noise in your system but as you have said you don't hear it when listening to vinyl then we can ignore those. The noise "from" CD (actually it's DAC noise, the CD itself is 100% noise free as far as audio is concerned) is completely different and doesn't sound like hiss and the noise from vinyl is competely differerent and also doesn't sound like hiss. So since a CD is obvioulsy not a tape then this hiss you can hear must come from somewhere in the studio recording, and that's easy find if you are talking about vintage analogue recordings. Ah, you say, but I cannot hear it from a vinyl copy of the same studio recording ... and you would be right - the vinyl noise is louder than the studio tape hiss so it masks it, but vinyl noise has a lower frequency spectrum (it does not sound like hiss) that puts in in the same range as the music you are listening too, so that masks the noise from the vinyl. There are rare occasions where the tape noise on a master tape is so bad you can hear it from a vinyl copy.

The characteristics of tape have been well researched and are well understood, the skill of the studio engineer is to get the best out of the media for any given requirement - this is the art of applying the science - the studio engineer didn't need to know the science to do this, he just had to be aware of the effect of each characteristic and how best to exploit or reduce it.

 

For example in the Otari MX80 graph I showed in an earlier post the low-frequency "hump" at 70Hz for a tape speed of 15ips moves up to 140Hz at 30ips, but there is a trade-off on high-frequency performance, the 15ips does not have "as good" a performance at 20KHz - and that 2:1 relationship is fixed - as you halve the tape speed the frequency of the "hump" also halves, so at 7½ips it would be 35Hz and at 3¾ips it would be at 17½Hz. BUT the top-end performance is affected by the same ratios - as the tape speed reduces the high frequency performance drops off in the same proportions so by the time we get down to cassette speeds we get a severe loss of high-frequency performance that everyone can easily hear regardless of the "quality" of their system. The skill of the studio engineer is in selecting the "best" tape speed for what they want to achieve - for many 15ips was better than 30ips because the low-frequencies were more important to them than the high-frequencies (when I was involved in analogue instrument data-logging we used tape-speeds as high as 60ips because the signals we were recording were ultrasonic, poor low-frequency performance was a bonus to us).

 

Tape noise also has a fixed relationship with the tape being used - noise is inversely proportional to the effective track-width of the tape - a 2inch tape has half the noise of a 1inch tape which has half the noise of a ½ tape etc. - another direct 2:1 relationship - that noise difference expressed in dB is 3db - 2inch tape has 3dB less noise than 1inch tape, and 6db less than ½ tape. BUT if the 2inch tape has twice as many tracks as the 1inch tape then the effective tape width per track is the same so the noise values will also be similar. Therefore a 4-track ½inch tape recording will have a similar noise value per track as a 16-track 2inch tape because the effective track width on both cases is 1/8 of an inch.

 

This tape noise is a product of the particles of magnetic material used in the magnetic recording surface and is another fixed constant - doubling tape speeds makes the particles effectively smaller (by a factor of 2) and that can reduce the noise-floor (it does not change the amplitude of the noise, it moves it higher up the frequency spectrum to where it is easier to remove). That is another factor that the studio engineer has to consider when making a recording.

 

The material the tape surface is made from also affects the apparent noise-floor - adding chromium or cobalt (as in super-avilyn) or metal alters the signal-to-noise ratio not by reducing the level of the noise, but by moving the signal away from that noise level. Essentially you are making the signal bigger so the SNR ratio is improved. This is accomplished by the different biasing levels used on those different tape materials (the old Type-I, Type-II etc).

 

(Dynamic) Noise Reduction methods were another way of improving the SNR, again they do not reduce the inherent tape noise - that is fixed and constant - they work by increasing the size of the signal at certain frequencies (or range of frequencies) to increase the ratio between "signal" and "noise" - the decoding process then reduces the amplitude of the signals and their associated noise - the SNR at the unboosted frequencies remains unchanged but the overall effect when added to the improved SNR of the de-boosted frequencies is an overall reduction in noise compared to the a recording without Noise Reduction... (I'm sure I could have explained that better - if you want to know more there are better resources on the Interwebs that describe the NR processes). HOWEVER, this is another trade-off - Noise Reduction affects the music content.

 

Noise is additive. Copy a tape recording to another tape and the signal (almost) remains the same but the noise from the first tape will add to the noise on the second tape. I put 'almost' in brackets: If the tape recorder characteristic boosted the bass signal and reduced the top-end then the copy will boost the bass again and reduce the top-end again. This is called Generation Loss and is a known and inescapable consequence of tape duplication. It is also why the music industry was not as concerned about pirate tape copying as it is about pirate digital copying - successive tape copies get progressively worse - successive digital copies remain as good as the original. The cassette duplicates Snowie made of his vinyls was never going to be as good as the original, even with the best tape deck in the whole world ever. (but if it was good enough and he was happy then that is not a problem).

 

Likewise if you make two separate recordings of two separate instruments onto two tapes (or two tracks) and mix (add) them together onto a third tape (or third track) and the noise will also add and the frequency characteristic of the tape performance will also add. [You will have two times the frequency response change and three times the noise level]. This doesn't mean much in the home environment but it means a lot in a studio and is another skill that the analogue studio engineer employs when producing an analogue recording. In my example of effective tape widths I said 4-track ½inch recorder has a similar noise/track value as a 16-track 2inch recorder  (and by inference an 8-track 1inch recorder) - which would imply perhaps that there is no difference between them, but this shows that the increased number of available tracks can reduce the overall noise content of the final mix.

 

When you have fewer tracks at your disposal you have to use more "bounce-downs" to record a final track. If, for example, you have 4 tracks and you record the drums - you can mike-up all the parts of the drum and live mix them onto one track leaving the other three for all the other instruments and vocals - or you can mike-up the kicks and toms on one track, the snare and high-hat on another and the "overheads" (cymbals etc) on the third - but this only leaves the fourth track free to record everything else. In that case what the studio engineer does is bounce down those three drum tracks to one and records it onto that fourth free track, he can then erase the three original tracks to free them up to record all the other instruments and vocals. The advantage of that is he does not have to do that mix live as the drummer is playing and he can try different mixes with different EQ, compression and other effects on each track, and even (heaven forbid) involve the drummer himself in that process. The disadvantage is generation losses that result from the bounce down, because the next stage could be to record the bass guitar and that then could also be bounced down with the drum track, and the same again to the rhythm guitar etc etc. and each successive bounce-down adds noise and further changes to the original drum track. A bounce-down will never have the same noise or frequency performance as a single live mix. So a 24-track recorder does not just mean you can record more instruments, it also means you can use fewer bounce-downs, which will obviously result in less noise in the final mix and the sound of the original drum recording is unaffected by successive re-recording onto a new piece of tape (ie less generation loss). [Another "obviously" at play here is in a digital studio this "limitation" does not exist - you can bounce-down as much as you like without affecting the final signal to noise ratio or the final sound of the original track recording]. {multi-track recorders also mean that if you want to alter just the kick-drums for example in the final mix you can, with live mixing or bounce-downs you cannot}

 

This does not mean "bad" - it is just a measure of the skill of the studio engineer in how he manages the noise in his mixing. Dave Stewart (not the Prog one, the other one) only uses an 8-track analogue recorder, he is skilled at using a combination of live mixing and bounce-downs to achieve what he wants - some like what he produces, some don't. But this is why some vintage analogue recordings are noiser than others and this is why sometimes you can hear the studio tape-hiss on a vinyl pressing.

 

 

tl;dr

Um..taping it means..well..taping it to magnetic tape. As to recording vinyl records onto CD. Well you can't improve on the source can you.

Anyway. I will never ever agree with you and you won't with me. I can live with that.