Why Steve Albini Still Prefers Analog Tape 440
CNET's Steve Guttenberg ("The Audiophiliac") profiles prolific audio engineer and general music industry do-it-all Steve Albini; Albini (who's worked on literally thousands of albums with musicians across a wide range of genres) has interesting things to say about compression, the rise of home-recording ("The majority of recordings will be crappy, low-quality recordings, but there will always be work for engineers who can do a good job, because there will always be people who appreciate good sound."), and why he still prefers to record to analog tape. (Note: Albini is justly famous not just for his production work, but in particular for his essay "The Problem with Music.")
"Digital recordings will be unplayable" (Score:5, Insightful)
And the longevity of analog tape? It decays. We have a steady stream of older musicians who are desperate to use our ancient reel-to-reels for a chance to digitize their brittle, fragile old tape recordings.
No storage medium is permanent, but PCM audio has remained mostly unchanged since Max Mathews, Bell Labs, 1957.
Re:how can you not play an audio file? (Score:4, Insightful)
How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future? That's hard to predict. Some new something could be just around the corner that will make people dump and forget the current stuff. And the current stuff could have some goofy DRM in it that the musician cannot detect and that limits decoder makers because they don't want to get sued.
Why Analogue? Stranded investment. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you had a few hundred thousand dollars tied up in analogue equipment you would champion it's "superiority" too. That and resistance to change. Don't get me wrong the guy makes great sounding records. but I doubt if Steve or anyone else for that matter could pass a double blind test and identify analoge from high end digital.
stupid industry know-nothings (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, WTF? Apparently, Albini hasn't heard about the troubles studios and bands that existed before 1980 have been experiencing with their archives. They have to bake the tapes in the oven to get one last good play before the substrate disintegrates entirely. With digital, at least, you can keep backing up your precious masters to new formats without loss, to say nothing of the benefits of having redundant clones stored in disparate locations. I doubt very seriously that capability to read WAV or other formats that are simply a header tacked onto interleaved PCM samples will ever be lost.
Then the schmuck writing the article thinks noisy analog tape has "higher definition" than 24-bit digital. The fight against audiophoolery and ignorance will probably never end...
He's a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
He might be a fantastic audio engineer, but I think his reason for continuing to use analog tape is idiotic.
I can't see FLAC losing support for a long long time. When it finally does, the beauty of lossless digital formats is that you can batch-convert your entire library into a newer, better format with a very small script and no loss of quality. Seriously, if you don't have the diligence to convert your music library once every 25 years, do you really think you'll be able to keep a tape from rotting or being accidentally degaussed?
As for tape -- once it's on there, that's it. You can't transfer the audio anywhere else without it being lossy. Audio engineers have been able to transfer older recordings from tape with excellent results so I'm not say it would necessarily sound bad (assuming your tape is still good) but why use a lossy format if you don't have to?
I can only assume his reasoning is for the super-long-term Roland Emmerich future. In 2000 years, some aliens will be digging up a post-nuke Earth and come across a collection of tapes, which will be easy to reverse engineer relative to a digital system's multiple formats (HDD/file system/compression).
This sounds like the classic case of an audiophile finding a way to justify use of an ancient technology, but I don't understand how an actual audio engineer could succumb to such nonsense.
Re: how can you not play an audio file? (Score:2, Insightful)
it is the same principled stance as Stallman. don't wait until there is a problem - make sure there never is a problem.
I disagree with him, but I appreciate his concerns. he has spent 20 years trying to get people out from under the thumb of the RIAA, and this is one of his many tools to do so.
"because It's not a problem now" is how people paint themselves into a corner.
Re:stupid industry know-nothings (Score:4, Insightful)
Albini uses analog tape because it provides him with some job security. If you have a 1/2" analog tape recorded on a $20,000 machine, you're going to have to find a $20,000 tape machine to play it back.
The one thing he has right is that those $20,000 machines are usually surrounded by guys who know how to place microphones, how to use EQ and mastering gear. They're usually surrounded by rooms where care has been taken to get good sound.
It's the milieu, not the technology. Albini is a smart guy and an opportunist, but he's also often full of shit.
Re:how can you not play an audio file? (Score:5, Insightful)
Analog tape playback is still available, after almost a century...
Unfortunately, analog (magnetic) tape starts shedding oxide after about 15 years.
Magnetization starts to print through and creates pre and post 'echos.'
As the magnetic signal weakens, the signal-to-noise ratio degrades.
To be archived, you have to bake the tape (in an oven) and then you get one playback on your analog deck, so it can be digitized for archive.
If instead you record it onto another magnetic tape, you've just added more tape hiss and distortion that wasn't there in the original.
If you want true 'analog,' go to a live concert with no amplification.
If you want fidelity: record, mix and deliver digitally.
I don't want to sit at home and listen to analog tape hiss, or wow, or flutter, or dynamic or frequency limitations. (or for so-called vinyl "purists": vinyl record noise.)
I don't want to hear all the limitations and artifact of the recording media.
I want to hear what the people sitting in the studio heard. Digital get me closer to that than analog tape.
Re:how can you not play an audio file? (Score:4, Insightful)
I want to hear what the people sitting in the studio heard. Digital get me closer to that than analog tape.
Amen brother! I love producing music with computers. I spend hours looking for sweet spots inside the resonant wavelength of the instrument to find the right sound. I have cases of microphones that I have built up to find the right combinations of sounds.
But I still record digitally. I like Albini's sentiment about bandwidth limiting. I've found that if you record and listen at 96/24 and it sounds so realistic. I think it is a good comparison to analogue tape. However I think we are starting to get enough power to mix at even higher sampling rate and still be affordable rendering this a moot point. However music producers are about the only ones who do listen at this sampling rate and digital technology has it's own characteristics just like analogue tape does.
The difference is that whilst analogue tape's characteristics are well explored, digital recording is still evolving - and I think that is really exciting for music.
Most people's closest experience to a higher sample rate is at 44khz, but even less so, a Psychoacoustic algorithm that bust's up my algorythm evaluating and deciding what is important to hear in terms of comparisons to other transient sounds!!! I've always thought of mp3 as more advertising than anything else, so I want to make sure it's enjoyable and control that.
I'm just hoping the digital music industry can grow something beautiful in the shit that musicians have to go through.
Re: how can you not play an audio file? (Score:4, Insightful)
yep, not many people have the ability to play back 78's, wire recordings, 8 tracks, minidiscs, etc.
and digital files are difficult to open from floppy diskettes, especially if the original file format is for a program that no longer exists (opcode vision for Mac OS8 anyone? how about dr T's for DOS?)
Re:No Analog is not better... (Score:4, Insightful)
A sawtooth wave decomposes neatly into a sine wave of the same frequency and lower amplitude sine waves at harmonics of the fundamental. Since your ear can't hear those, it can't tell a 15KHz sawtooth from a 15KHz sine either. The structure of the ear performs an analog version of the Fourier transform.
What a higher sample rate CAN do for you is allow the necessary low-pass filter to introduce it's inevitable distortion well above human hearing and provide some extra information that might be useful in re-mastering.