Last Manufacturer of Pro Analog Audio Tape Closes 550
goosman writes "Quantegy, the last manufacturer of professional reel-to-reel analog audio tape in the world has closed their plant in Opelika, AL leaving a reported 250 workers without jobs, according to the Opelika-Auburn News. Emtec (the former BASF, which used to be AGFA) was the last European manufacturer and ceased manufacuring in 2002. An audio account of the closing can be heard at NPR."
Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Irony (Score:5, Funny)
OT: Recursion Joke in Data Structures Text (Score:5, Funny)
The best jokes are always the subtle ones.
Re:OT: Recursion Joke in Data Structures Text (Score:3, Funny)
The best jokes are always the subtle ones.
Indeed. On the cover of "Numerical Methods that Work", by Acton, the word 'Usually' is faintly embossed (but not inked in) between 'that' and 'Work'. Superb!
Re:Irony (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
No, irony would be an employee at OSHA dying in an accident caused by unsafe workplace conditions. This is just the radio media reporting on something having to do with outmoded audio tape. If they had claimed that the plant should have stayed open because reel to reel tape is an ideal medium for distributing radio content while they themselves don't use it, that might be considered irony.
struder? (Score:3, Funny)
Studer!
Re:Irony (Score:5, Funny)
How To Satisfy The Irony Police (Score:5, Informative)
- Irony describes a result that is the opposite of what would commonly be expected under the circumstances.
- From that definition, you can see that there must be a common expectation in the first place. If an event happens that is merely coincidental or unrelated to the circumstances, it is "unlikely" or maybe "unfortunate" but not ironic. Even if something is coincidental in a regrettable, cynical, extreme, or unusual way, that does not make it ironic.
- Example 1: Rain on your wedding day -- regrettable, but your wedding day has nothing to do with the weather. Not ironic.
- Example 2: Running off with the best man on your wedding day. Ironic.
- If an event is appropriate given the circumstances, it is "fitting" or "apropos," not ironic. Even if something is fitting in a clever or unusual way, it cannot be ironic. In fact, apropos and ironic are more or less antonyms.
- Example 1: A traffic jam when you're already late -- something that just makes a bad situation worse is appropriate to the circumstance. Not ironic.
- Example 2: A traffic jam on a newly-opened expressway. Ironic.
So technically, I must say that no, the event you mentioned is not ironic but is better described as...[ ] extremely unfortunate
[ ] weirdly coincidental
[X] amusingly apropos
[ ] oddly fitting
[ ] poetic justice
and I hope you find this post useful.
Re:How To Satisfy The Irony Police (Score:5, Funny)
"David Blunkett losing his job as a result of intrusions into his private life"
See also: "Proof that God has a sense of humour"
Re:How To Satisfy The Irony Police (Score:3, Interesting)
If I say IANAL or 1337, are you going to complain that it's not a real word? Why would you be concerned when the 10,000th person uses irony to mean coincidence? Have you not clued in to the Slashdot dialect yet?
Someone please mod me and the parent to which I'm replying off-topic so that others don't have to waste their time.
Great story (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great story (Score:3, Interesting)
Something similar [cox.net] happens at the end of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Apparently, the master tape wasn't fully erased after its last use!
It's faint, but there's an unmistakable orchestral version of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" playing. Interestingly, both
250 people lost their jobs? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:250 people lost their jobs? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:250 people lost their jobs? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a few good tapes. One is a 'Christmas 1954' tape, recorded by a geek-Dad. They hand the microphone around and all the family say what they got for Christmas. At the beginning the say 'and this, hopefully, will be syncronized well with the film.'
Definitely a 1950's AV-nerd geek event!
Also, some sound tracks of 'I Love Lucy' episodes, that might not even exist in any other form. Who knows...
It
Re:250 people lost their jobs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:250 people lost their jobs? (Score:4, Informative)
Well the answer to the problem came from high power vairable speed electric motors. With those you also need to regulate the voltage and it turns out to be a bitch to design a stepped system that does so properly, cheaply, and efficiently. So what they did is use a different kind of control, called pulse wave modulation, PWM. What you do is take a high frequency digital (square) wave that alternates between maximum and minimum voltage, and just vary the duty cycle to give you the level of power you want. The more pwoer you want in a given direction, the more pulses that direction you have. Turns out to be real efficient, and easy to make. Only downside is it makes the device whine at the frequency of the wave.
Well, this could be applied to audio as well. Simply vary the rate of pulse to control the output signal. The whining is solved by using a wave of sufficiently high frequency that it exceeds human hearing and speaker capabilities (usually in the MHz range). This proves to work extremely well, and eliminate the problems with digital sound. All corrent D/A converters I'm aware of use this method. You'll see it adverised at 1-bit DAC sometimes.
Some systems, like SDSD, forgoe the conversion process and store PWM directly.
Re:250 people lost their jobs? (Score:5, Informative)
Damn (Score:5, Interesting)
A dark day for those of us who loved the old analog sound.
Re:Damn (Score:2)
Re:Damn (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Damn (Score:5, Informative)
So true... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Damn (Score:2)
Re:Damn (Score:2)
>>roughly $500, and I can record at 96khz/24-bit,
I'm willing to bet thats 96khz SAMPLING.... which equates to a 48khz audio response. c.f. Nyquist sampling theorm.
Re:Damn (Score:5, Informative)
An actual 24-bit system has a theoretical Dynamic range of around 140dB but you'll be hard pressed to get better than 80dB with most gear. With analog recording there are at least two well-known foolproof methods to improve dynamic range and SNR: get a bigger tape, and run the tape faster. The dynamic range and SNR on 2", 32ips tape is amazing.
And of course tape can be driven to +9dB recording levels in some cases, but a digital system will clip hard at 0dB.
Digital is definitely the future but right digital recording has its problems. Next time you go to the record store notice how many High Resolution DVD-Audio recordings are being mastered from tapes.
Re:Damn (Score:5, Interesting)
> Next time you go to the record store notice how many High Resolution
> DVD-Audio recordings are [being mastered from tapes].
You could have saved yourself the bit in brackets, because that's about where SACD and its competitor are. For audio purists at least, the sad fact is that the CD is the cat's meow to the VAST MAJORITY of people, and the remaining dissenters just aren't enough of a market. I doubt higher quality audio will make much inroads in the future except in niche markets. Yes, the CD will be displaced, but it will give way to medium agnosticity rather than higher quality. IOW, people will be buying music in all shapes and forms (increasingly online), the CD will be just one of the formats, and of ever decreasing importance.
Then again, maybe this trend will indeed facilitate higher quality audio. Since the software won't be bound to a particular medium anymore, new formats (such as SACD) won't have to reach critical mass anymore to survive. Studios can simply record everything at the highest rate, and then sell the audio at various quality (and perhaps price) levels. Since you're downloading your new album anyway, you can either buy the 96KHz 4GB version for $25, or the 44KHz 600MB version for $15, or the compressed-to-hell MP3 version for $10. It's up to you how you store and play it back. And the industry doesn't have to go through the risky business of pushing yet another audio format through. I'm not sure the labels are there yet mentally, though, since at the moment they still seem to think that the medium equals the music.
Re:Damn (Score:3, Informative)
That's is what it's all about: use.
Theoretically you can absolutely duplicate an analog recording sound in a way that no human can tell the difference. You can at least duplicate it in a way that recreates it when you transfer it to a CD later; this is necessarily true seeing as they're both are just accessible bits.
The thing is, how hard is it to do this, at least, right now? Ridiculo
Re:Damn (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Damn (Score:5, Informative)
Timing is also much more important with audio than with video. People, for whatever reason, are not sensitive to timing jitter in a video signal, but are easily able to hear phase noise in a digital recording. Video uses faster clocks than audio, but their clocks are not as good (and don't need to be).
Re:Damn (Score:2)
Re:Damn (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Damn (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Damn (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Damn (Score:5, Informative)
Frequency distribution is a nice sharp spike at n Hz...
| |
| |
|_______|__
n
So we'll sample at 2n Hz
_ _
/ \ / \ - forgive the ascii art and
\_/ \_/ pretend that was a sine wave
_|__ __|__ - sampled at 2n Hz
| |
We'll even pretend that the studio gear sampled it perfectly (no clock jitter) since that gear
is likely pretty damned good. So our digital signal is +1,-1,+1,-1 just like it should be
But now we play it back on a cheapo walkman that doesn't have a perfect clock, so what it synthesizes is
_|_ ___|_ _
| |
and after filtering, the analog signal it produces now looks like this
_ _
/ | _/ | - again, forgive the ascii art,
|_/ |_/ but clearly it has steeper
sections and shallower ones
so it's no longer a pure tone
So the frequency distribution now looks like
|
| |
|_____|_|_|
n
it has some frequency content to both sides of the 'real' signal (how much and how far depends on the amount of jitter present). Obviously, the signals very close to the nyquist limit suffer most from this - the lower pitches get to average the wave-shape out over multiple samples, so they will not spread out as much in the freuency domain if a point is a little off in time. But this is why the nyquist limit is not the whole story. Along with the fact that no filter is a completely sharp dropoff, this is why CD's lowpass filter to <20kHz, not at the 22050Hz Nyquist limit).
Sampling beyond 96kHz is not (yet, anyway) mainstream gear. So I think the grandparen't claim that digital equipment works to 48kHz, but has a hard time as that limit is approached is pretty fair - that's the theoretical limit (for prosumer-grade stuff), and in practice it will have trouble near the edge.
Re:Damn (Score:2)
The difference is in resolution, much like a digital camera. A one-megapixel image is OK for a 3x5 picture. A five-megapixel image is OK for an 8x10 print. But if you really want a big picture (24x36 or larger), full of detail with no visible pixels, you still gotta go with real film.
And tape is exactly the same way. Digital recording is wonderful (I wouldn't go back to analog for a million bucks) but if you want the detail, ana
Re:Damn (Score:2)
In fact, there has been quite a resurgence in the use of analog gear in the past few years, so it is disappointing to se
Re:Damn (Score:2, Interesting)
Having said this it can't be long before some manufacturer brings out a piece of software that can mimic the sound of analogue tape...
Re:Damn (Score:5, Funny)
It's OK, you can build a cheap simulator withtwo cell phones and a crinkly plastic bag.
(takes tongue back out of cheek)
Re:Damn (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Damn (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Damn (Score:2)
This does sadden me, but I won't miss things like tape bleed-through and analog hums at every connection.
Re:Damn (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, you kids today, with your CD authoring programs, and laser cleaning discs. In my day, if
Didn't they used to be Ampex? (Score:4, Informative)
BBH
Re:Didn't they used to be Ampex? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Didn't they used to be Ampex? (Score:3, Funny)
Now wait a minute, younster. 80's music already performed one of the most important feats in history: the end of Disco . .
hawk, who remembers the horror
Re:Didn't they used to be Ampex? (Score:3, Informative)
So it appears there may be a reasonable supply of this stuff still around, and if they're "restructuring" maybe they'll make more before that supply runs out, but likely they were making _way_ more than demand called for, so... don't expect that $150 for 2500 feet price tag to drop when they do open their plant back up.
I don't know if "a lot"
In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe not today, but soon...
Kodak is shutting plants... (Score:2)
I suspect, however, that there will continue to be a small level of demand for film from analog photography hobbyists for many years to come. It might become a cottege industry, but there'll be an industry of sorts.
May not be closed permanently (Score:5, Informative)
Re:May not be closed permanently (Score:2)
Re:May not be closed permanently (Score:2)
- Cary Sherman
Market demands (Score:5, Interesting)
Pro tape, especially 2", is staggeringly expensive. And it still offers some qualities of sound which take a significant effort to duplicate with digital. Yes, this is aberration, but it's a desirable *analog* aberration, and studios that use tape contribute sort of a gestalt to the overall product, an organic quality.
I'm a big fan of digital, and I don't really care about analog tape, but I do sympathize with the folks still using 1" and 2" decks.
Digital recording is only *just now* getting to the point where it can truly take over. (It's been there for playback for decades, sure, but production is another story.)
But it's always been expensive to do 2". In the day, we'd get tapes that had been used once in a voiceover studio and bulk erase them.
Oh well... I feel sorry for the plant workers and anybody still using an ampex console. Somewhere I think i still have a Teac 4-track 1/4", and boxes of unused, or only partly used, tapes. Ebay time?
Re:Market demands (Score:3, Interesting)
I still use analogue tape! (Score:4, Informative)
This is horrible, tape is the only archival medium (Score:5, Interesting)
With tape you could use whatever you wanted to record a record, it all got put to the same tape and in most cases the tape lasted a very long time, 50 years plus. Better yet, often times the recording equipment was better than the tape playback so as time went on you could get better sound off the same tape because technology had advanced. Digital is locked in stone forever, never to reveal any improvements. Even as a crude 2nd step backup there is the potential to bounce your multi-track masters to multi-track tape for preservation.
Steve Albini, one of the world's best recording engineers has a good lecture about the importance of tape here [mtsu.edu]
Re:This is horrible, tape is the only archival med (Score:4, Interesting)
With tape you could use whatever you wanted to record a record, it all got put to the same tape and in most cases the tape lasted a very long time, 50 years plus.
This is true only in an optimal sense. In a very real and practical sense, it's not true at all. Many tapes are stored in only moderately optimal facilities, and a lot are stored in attics, sheds, and basements. A major scourge is the "Sticky shed" syndrome as described here [geocities.com], for example. while the old Ampex tapes were major culprits, in my own personal experience I have seen a large number and variety of tapes suffer similar fates.
Several months ago I had to resurrect a number of video tapes that had a similar problem. In short: tape is not as archival as vinyl. The question of archival quality audio reproduction is a hot topic being debated in library science. AFAIK, there have been no real concrete conclusions to the problem. From what I can gather, it seems very likely that the 21st century will simply disappear from history.
I hope that's not true, but there are an awful lot of extremely obvious and seemingly implacable problems facing archival audio and video storage.
RS
Re:This is horrible, tape is the only archival med (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. I used to work for a government agency that recorded missile telemetry on 1" 14 track analog tapes. If you stored them in a tightly controlled temperature/humidity environment they'd last a long time. The problem is that's relatively expensive, and it's not always clear what you most important reels are. We were asked to retrieve some data from a tape that was only about ten years old and it came off the reel like masking tape. We were able to restore
Re:This is horrible, tape is the only archival med (Score:2)
And music never sounded warmer than when recorded through the old Ampex tube electronics with a bit of dB boost to saturate the tape. Even if you got some distortion (and occasionally it was desired) it was a cool distortion and not the digital crackle you get from today's electronics.
I've been slowly
Re:This is horrible, tape is the only archival med (Score:2)
Yet another person confusing consumer playback with mid to high end production. He's talking about the multitude of multitrack recording programs out there. Will there be a program in 50 years that will be able to open the Cakewalk files someone made in their basement in their youth (assuming that person becomes the next Lennon or somthing)? Will I be able to open the tracks that I recorded 7 years ago in Deck II
Re:This is horrible, tape is the only archival med (Score:2)
Re:This is horrible, tape is the only archival med (Score:2)
open source.
they'll be readable as long as someone can program.
probably easier than assembling a player for that tape too.
What will happen now is... (Score:2)
Everytime they change formats you have to upgrade. (Score:4, Funny)
The equivalent of... (Score:2)
I remember even ten years ago, when my DJ company would get shipments of new music on vinyl, the Canadian record companies were having to bring the records in from the U.S. because there were no pressing plants left in Canada.
And now there's not even any analog tape being made in N.A.! Does anybody else smell a cottage industry opportunity?
welp, not too surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
analog can be of high quality, particularly when it comes to balanced signals and such for all your inputs...but analog reel to reel? I can definitely see why that's going.
First
Re:welp, not too surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
As the proud owner of 2 brands of 24/96 cards (the good ones...or I would have 'settled' for a much cheaper 24/192 card--you know who I'm talking about) I can honestly say that analog--even my limited 1/4" experiences--is far more flexible with signal, has far more 'air' to it--a sound guy term for something we can't quite describe..
Where 2" reel-to-reel is used (Score:5, Insightful)
Somewhere in those notes, there'll be a logo that says either AAD, ADD, or DDD. If your CD is either one of the first two, then the original instruments were recorded to 2" tape. If it's the second, then the 2" tape was mastered to 1/2" tape.
A LOT of professional recording studios still use this technology. For one thing, if you send too much signal into an analog tape, you get a nice sounding tape compression, whereas if you send too much signal into a ADC, you get really horrible sounding digital clipping.
\/me wonders what several hundred recording studios in L.A. are gonna do now.
Soft clipping in the digital realm (Score:2, Informative)
For one thing, if you send too much signal into an analog tape, you get a nice sounding tape compression, whereas if you send too much signal into a ADC, you get really horrible sounding digital clipping.
That's why you use high-resolution ADCs and run them at a safe margin less than full scale. Then, when you load the file into your mixer, you take the arctangent of each sample to get soft clipping.
Not dead yet (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a few open reel recorders that get regular use, including a fairly new (less than ten years old) Tascam unit.
Analog audio recording is similar to motion picture film (I have some cameras for that, as well) - digital (so far) just can't compare. There's a special magic to it that can't be replaced.
It's not the end, yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Quantegy bought the reel tape business from AMPEX... and they're apparently failing as a company.
This will probably resolve itself as:
A) Quantegy gets its act together and the plant reopens, or
B) Quantegy goes under, plant is sold and it reopens.
As others have pointed out, there's still a significant pro market, and many audiophile types, so there's enough market for the right supplier.
Random 4 Letter Names (Score:3, Funny)
The company will just change names and start over again. The new name will actually be....
(..pulls four scrabble tiles at random..)
QMAZ!!!
Holy Cow! Triple Word Score!!
as an audio guy... (Score:4, Interesting)
As an 'audio guy' I have encountered so many 'analog heads' that I think for the wound-up-no-clue-audiophile-asshole market alone this would be worth somebodies while to maintain.
Once again, before I ramble too far off topic... I don't believe it. There are far too many studios run by far too many producers which insist--for one reason or another (read: valid or not)--insist on nothing but analog...high quality analog....1" reels, 2" reels...1/2" reels....for mixdown, for final masters...etc. I simply do not believe it. Too many 'big name studios' operate with this techonlogy as the centerpiece of their of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. There's something to think about.
While I am continually saddened at the migration away for more sturdy analog ancestors of our current-day digital equipment, I simply do not believe that such a market--small but used to paying top-$$$ for everything....even tape--would be abandon outright.
I'm either in disbelief like denial, or disbelief like 'I genuinely don't believe it'
lost jobs... (Score:2)
I'm not too sympathetic to these people laid off. They've known this was coming for at least 10 years.
Yeah, offtopic, mod me down (Score:2, Offtopic)
Last manufacturer worldwide? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sad (Score:2)
Does this presage the end of digital tape storage? Probably not for a while, the cost per bit is still pretty low once you've made the investment in drive
the old story of the tube and transistor (Score:4, Interesting)
the story goes that two engineers were arguing about the sound merits of tubes vs transistors. the tube guy liked the 'sound' of tubes and thought this was the correct sound. the transistor amp just didn't sound right to the tube guy.
the transistor guy went back to the lab and re-evaluated his design and changed a few things. he returned to the bake-off and gave the tube guy another listen.
"its sound great now! what did you do?" asked the tube guy.
"well, I analyzed the distortion, hum and feedback problems your tube amp had and I installed filters and network to create the same set of intermod and distortion you find pleasing"
morale: its not really the components, its the implementation.
that said, I'll take an average digital signal over even a high-end analog one anyday. noise, hum and distortion are NOT my friends.
This is actually true. (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't sell.
Then, almost as a joke, he designed the Carver Silver 7 [wardsweb.org] tube amp. 20 tubes per channel. $25,000 each. Two huge chassis per channel. Huge transformers. Same transfer function.
Named the "best amplifier of the decade" by The Absolute Sound.
Re:the old story of the tube and transistor (Score:3, Interesting)
So what does everybody do? They mix so that every track is in the top 4 bits, because people perceive "louder" as "better". But it totally eliminates one of the main things that makes digital superior. The order of magnitude higher dynamic headroom. Thrown away because "we" lack the taste for anything like a quiet passage or a subdued element in a mix.
I know of
Tom Scholz, Rev. Martin Luther King (Score:3, Interesting)
"Classic Sound of Boston is Still Tom Scholz, Still Recording on Tape"
http://www.gibson.com/absolutenm/templates/Feat
-----------
The big problem here is that analog tape is the universal archival medium.
100 years from now, engineers will be able to play back 2-inch 24-track tape if it's been carefully environmentally preserved. But in 2104, who will be able to access and remix the individual tracks on an IDE hard disk of an elaborately mixed album recorded in Cubase SX 2.2 optimized for a Motorola G4 processor running Mac OS X 10.2? Nobody. All we will have, if we are lucky, is a 16-bit CD with a stereo mix.
In 1997 I interned at Crawford Productions, a huge broadcast post-production facility in Atlanta Georgia. The Martin Luther King Foundation brought in Reverend King's entire library of sermons and speeches, which were on 1/4 inch reel-to-reel and cassette, for archival restoration. While Crawford made DATs and CDs, they explained to the Martin Luther King Foundation that they were also re-copying everything to fresh 1/4 inch analog tape, and that this would be the preferred archival method and the tapes they should most jealously protect.
What now?
Digital: it's about efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Labels don't give people a million dollars and say "come back when you're finished" anymore. They give you 2 months and $30k.
Faced with this, the goal becomes good quality quickly. Sure, people argue about the warmth and crispness of analog. But what most analog purists miss is the outright efficiency of digital recording.
If you've ever recorded a song, you know that no matter how good you are there is almost always a better take (with a very few exceptions). When that $30k is all you have, it is imperitive that the take be the best one.
With tape, it's take...stop...evaluate...rewind...record. And pray fervently you don't accidently overwrite something.
With digital, you can literally get 10 times the work done. takestopevaluatetakestopevaluate. There is no waiting, and if you screw up you hit 'undo'.
Even most of the folks that do have a million bucks and want to record onto analog promptly dump to digital for mixing. And the 'warmth' and 'crispness' of analog is largely a myth as of about 5 years ago (when ADATs started to die their long deserved death). Play a 2 inch recorded track vs a protools recorded track and 99.9% of the people out there will never know. A good producer/engineer can work wonders with good preamps and outboard gear.
So yes, it's a sad day...but not nearly as monumental as purists would have you believe. People who depend on this stuff for a living dumped this along time ago.
Alas, poor Analog... (Score:5, Interesting)
Having spent most of my teens, twenties, and thirties in recording studios (as a musician, engineer, producer, and owner), there's a lot I'm going to miss about analog recording on tape.
I'm not about to start the analog vs. digital flamefest. I see more good about digital than bad, but there are a few qualities of analog (particularly the last point above) that are worth preserving.
k.
Clarification on BASF and AGFA (Score:3, Informative)
Analog vs. digital? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
In every respect.
I am an audiophile, and If you are to play vinyl through headphones to someone in the next room they will not be able to tell the difference between the original source and a digital recording of the vinyl playback. A digital recording can have a superset of all measurable audio components - spectrum and amplitude.
And as for the aliasing of digital recordings, when the sound hits the air it IS analog it becomes analog. When you use very high quality digital audio recordings you can capture and reproduce sounds that begin to (and for all intents do) border on the limits of they physics of sound itself.
Digital is superior in every way to analog. it is a myth that a person can hear the difference in a sufficciently high sample-rate recording.
Imagine an analog recording like a wooden box. You can hold it and carry it around. eventually it will begin to wear and tear.
Digital is like the knowledge of how to build that box. everytime you want to use the box you can build it from scratch instantaneously and you have a perfect, brand new box.
Sure, it's made out of wood from a different tree than your last box - but it is in better shape and the wood which you construct it out is of the same type and is stronger since it is unworn.
Furthermore, with the eventual advent of exponentially more sophisticated computation we will see the ability to record sound and reproduce it in such a way that it could be called seamless.
This will be accomplished not by a direct imprint on some meduim, but via an informational representation (analogous to digital) which will so dwarf the capabilities of the ancient idea of analog recordings that those who said analog is superior will be gaffawed in a similar fashion as we laugh at the gentleman below for his statements.
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
- Marshal Ferdinand Foch [Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre] (circa 1911)
He was Supreme Commander of Allied forces, 1918
He held a similar attachment to the classical way of doing things and saw inherent superiority in his beliefs.
He was wrong for reasons blatently obvious from the perspective of the modern day.
Re:Yikes (Score:2, Troll)
And I CAN tell the difference.
However, i will agree that the quality does degrade over time with analog. Digital does not.
Re:Yikes - analog recordings aren't live (Score:2)
Re:Yikes - analog recordings aren't live (Score:2)
And, incidentally, most of the TAS guys seem to be happy enough with SACD -- but not so much CD. The original poster's observation that you can't tell the difference between digital and analog with sufficient sam
Re:Yikes (Score:3, Insightful)
And I CAN tell the difference.
Christ, more luddite horseshit from another "audiophile". Can analog recordings be better than digital ones? Certainly they can, in the early years of the CD revolution a lot of CDs were remastered with the RIAA equalization curves that were used to master LPs, which meant that you superimposed an unsuitable equalization curve over a media t
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
Analog storage is limited by the speed of the recording medium and the amount of surface area utilized to store the analog soundwaves (in whatever fashion).
Even professional recording gear resolves far less sound information than what digital audio gear can do... Sure, a standard CD is a pretty paltry 44khz/16bit. So crank it up to professional units... 96khz or higher, go to 24bit recording... Still not enough? Go even higher if you want, but you'd be deluding yourself if you think you'll hear the difference.
The sound quality that people tend to like in analog gear is a result of the imprecision of the devices. Signals tend to leak, get transformed and modified by the analog gear they pass through, and also as it relates to the environment the gear is in (RF interference, atmospherics, etc). Some would argue that it gives them a "wamer, richer tone", but it all boils down to analog devices not maintaining an exact representation of the sound they are conveying.
So yes, you probably can tell the difference, but what you're hearing isn't a result of the storage medium, but of interm processing and modification through imprecise devices.
If you were to take the same output of the analog tape deck and record it into a high-quality digital deck (at the aforementioned 96/24), then play both of those back, you'd never be able to tell the difference.
So, if you want to argue that you prefer sound processed through analog gear, that's just fine. To call digital "lower quality" is foolish.
N.
Re:Yikes (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree that one day--soon, at that--analog will be dwarfed in every way by what we do in the digital realm....it still won't be the same an equivalent analog counterpart...I'll let you choose what determines 'counterpart'
Analog is a continuous wave....digital is not. Period. Aside from the idiosynchrosies that make analog a great medium (creat
Re:Yikes (Score:3, Funny)
A good nuclear EMP will render digital playback equipment useless and erase magnetic media.
Re:Yikes (Score:3, Funny)
Oh God, an audiophile flamewar. Slashdot editors, delete this thread, now! Oh no...it's too late! I'm melting....I'm melting....
Re:Yikes (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps what they need is a mixing board with Volumes that go to 11
Re:Okay, how is the evolution of communication new (Score:2)
How not? Perhaps DAT can't compare to professional analog reel-to-reel systems, but there are many modern digital systems that match or exceed the dynamic range and frequency response of any analog audio recording system.
Re:Okay, how is the evolution of communication new (Score:4, Informative)
Um...if memory serves, magnetizable objects are made up of a bunch of little regions, called "magnetic domains," that are like little magnets. (A magnet just has the magnetic fields of the domains all lined up rather than in random directions.) These domains aren't infinitely small, just as photographic film suffers from grain. (Hence the cranking up of tape speed for higher fidelity, increasing the domains passed over per unit time.)
Also, it's not clear to me that an analog medium can be written to or read with infinite accuracy--but I hope someone more knowledgeable than I am can expound on that.
Re:Okay, how is the evolution of communication new (Score:3, Interesting)