Yes sad isn't it that they know no better. Why is it that once I went to a Christmas panto all those years ago and took great delight and interest in hearing those instruments that the fine "tone" of our ancient olde radiogram could never handle?..
Yet a friend of mine involved in a hi-fi firm says that business is still quite buoyant with a lot of their customers overseas, mainly far east!...
I didn't say that. I said tape was awful.
IF you had a wide enough tape running fast enough and you calibrated the kit on a regular basis and re spooled the tape every few months to avoid ghosting and' it COULD, with a sacrifice of a virgin and a goat at midnight, give a passable imitation of 'a recording device'.
Unless you added Dolby, in which case you needed three virgins and a prayer to St. Bridget as well.
Well since you were disagreeing with a straw man you yourself set up. that's not surprising.
Did the BBC achieve miracles of recording with tape? Yes they did. They had engineers who understood it.
Is the average analogue recording from a rock band so bad as to be in places unusable? yes.
I remember standing behind a desk and saying to te 'sound engineer;'' 'er the hi hats are totally overloading' and of course I could hear that... because hi hats are sharp transient high frequencies which tape does NOT like. 'No they aint' he said pointing at the VU meters just tipping into the red...
I thought about telling him about short high frequency transients, high frequency tape pre-emphasis, and the sort of averaging a VU meter does, its needle inertia the like. Then I looked at him, thought better of it and nodded' and left.
I remember being asked to set up a Nakamichi cassette recorder to give the 'best possible' sound. Widely hailed as the best cassette recorder ever made. I was completely unable to get a flat response beyond
2.5khz, and it was largely dead at 8khz, about -4dB more on on track than the other irrespective.I tried it on a variety of cassette brands and technologies. Each one had a completely different frequency response and gain. Enough to make using Dolby a complete joke.
IN the end I decided not to look at the meters and just got as much treble as I could without being edgy, and made sure it gave an adequate response to its owners favourite recordings. "Isn't it a piece of kit?" he enthused.."Yes, it certainly is," I agreed and left hurriedly.
The Russ Andrews syndrome* we call it today I think.
That people achieved miracles with it and with vinyl, is despite, not because of its inherent qualities.
When you actually look at the amount of pre-emphasis applied, and the amount of companding that Dolby did, you will realise that in the case of anything short of professional studio machines you were already 'compressing' the data severely on a tape. Just in a different way.
That MP3 players (and CDs) wiped out cassette players in a few short years tells you something. MP3 was better even at low bit rates than Cassette.
And you only need to look at the pre-emphasis to see why. Cassettes may have appeared to give you 100hz-8khz and 55dB S/N. But they certainly did NOT have that dynamic range in the last couple of octaves. You could do lossless comparison of audio and get data rates massively down. And still be better than tape. CDS are not compressed not because its gives a better sound, but because it makes the player cheaper. At the time small CPUS capable of untangling a compressed digital stream simply were not available - they had enough issues with the D to A converters which were truly dire and led to the 'Vinyl sounds better than CD' myth, that started as a fact but became a myth a few years later.
Actually the most difficult sound to compress without loss is the audience applause that follows the concert.
I did spend 12 years or more designing professional audio kit. I stopped at about the time digital recording came in because apart from the actual loudspeakers, every other link in the chain was developed to the point where it was essentially so good you really didn't need to try and make it better.
And my name ain't Russ Andrews.
That people have leveraged compression to try and squeeze more onto less to the point where informations is lost does not mean that compressions itself means loss of information that you wanted to hear.
And I stand by my statement that tape was, the worst possible recording medium ever, except for all the alternatives available at that time.
*the more you pay the better it sounds, irrespective of what objective tests tell you.
See my other post. Even THAT was not as good as you think it was.
I worked in recording studios as well as in concert halls and discotheques. Grandmother/eggs/suck.
Don't confuse the quality of a technology with the results you can achieve with it.
An ex-army story illustrates the point: platoon pinned down by mortar and sniper fire coming from a cave.. platoon has wire guided missile, but can't make it hit.
Man wanders up 'look have you calibrated that?' 'No' OK look, first you have to level it, then you have to......
...then you put the crosshairs here on the cave there..is that the right cave..? Yes..OK then you hit the tit, wait 5 seconds in its a Norwegian blue, see?
And it was..
Nowadays it's probably all digital GPS and gyro stabilised and all you do is heft it on your shoulder and press the tit. Back then it was analogue...
Less to go wrong.
The rot set in with rock bands who were unable or unwilling to play at a balanced sound level with each other.
No they weren't, there are some excellent recordings around from years gone by. The tech performance of the recording medium whilst improved over time isn't the be all and end all of a good recording...
Can't find the link now but theres a pix of an innocent looking tape machine that was used to record Queen's A night at the opera containing the famous bohemian rhapsody!, now thats not a good recording;?...
Probably because they listen to the music rather than the reproduction. If I know a piece of music I can listen to and enjoy it using the most basic of kit, my theory being that my brain 'fills in the gaps'. However, for it to do that I have to have already listened on high quality kit or to a live performance or my brain won't know what's in the gaps.
I keep master versions in CD quality, and create MP3s from them for use when out and about. The storage cost of the masters on a home PC is negligible, especially when you compare it to the cost of the CDs! And of course it's those that I listen to at home.
I've got into the habit of now digitising LPs/tapes at 96k/24 and keeping this as flac. Given what you say about the size of modern storage and the way bigger amounts will become available this now seems fine. Saves any faffing about doing any processing down to 'lower' formats that save space.
I do, though, convert the recordings to mono if the LP is mono. Not so much to save space as to reduce the background rumble and distortion levels. The change in rumble is quite noticable on headphones for some discs as the level varies from disc to disc.
Yes. I make copies to three different HDs, kept in different rooms, one not normally connected to anything.
I still like having a CD (or LP) from the point of view of having a physical artifact I can file, examine, read the cover-notes, etc. But in practice well made digital versions are easier to play and organise. And being able to store items 'out of sight' does reduce the level of clutter.
Alas for having a tidy home, I've started to buy LPs again! A nearby
2nd-hand LP shop has opened. I'm not a fan of their 'pop/rock' because - as you could predict - the pop/rock LPs I've tried tend to be badly worn, scratched, etc. However they have boxes of old Jazz LPs at low prices. Many of these seem near mint condition for the ones for pre-bop/modern items. Double 'RCA Jazz Tribune' sets for 3 quid! :-)Seems to show that most pop/rock LPs got thrashed. But that many Jazz fans took far more care of their LPs. That said, some of the LPs have things like "London Weekend Television" library stamps on them. So might have only been played once or twice. 8-] Although heaven knows how long ago LWT would have disposed of its LP library!
Jim
Remember the one at the Science Museum?
I used to have Beethoven's Ninth on LP, where they always have to split the third movement, and got so used to it that I would jump if I heard the whole thing without the split (on a radio broadcast). Then I got it on Musicassette which split the movement in a different place, so I would jump in two places.
Prior to the renovation of the Royal Opera House just before the Millennium, they used mercury arc rectifiers to power the First World War submarine motors they used for the stage machinery.
Then there was the '8 track' which had effectively 4 'sides'. So an extra two breaks per record. ;-) With pop stuff, they used to re-arrange the track order for best fit which came as somewhat of a surprise if you were used to the record.
You've obviously not had experience of Dolby SR.
You'd also think by your post that digital gives perfect results every time. Which means you don't much listen to current commercial recordings.
Professional digital equipment as currently made is capable of better quality than the equivalent analogue equipment. Even bottom end digital recorders are of a quality I could only dream of in the 1970s.
On the other hand, there are a lot more incompetent operators producing stuff for general consumption round nowadays than there once were. Partly, this is because almost anyone can afford a digital setup, whereas, in the days of analogue recording, there was a major investment in easily damaged equipment, so the ham fisted and half deaf operators very rarely got anywhere near it.
Don't blame the tools for the bad sound on modern CD releases.
Given I worked as a sound engineer in broadcast all my life I'm well aware of that.
Quite. For all the wonders of computer control and digital everything, the end result is frequently rather worse than in the all analogue days. Where people had to be trained to get acceptable results.
Faster cars with easier controls don't make for better driving standards.
The point really is that the original CD was designed for as near faultless domestic reproduction as possible. And nothing has changed in the laws of physics since. Any data reduction algorithm simply makes that worse. It may not be audible on some things - but you can be certain it will be on others.
I bought a similar portable battery powered 'tape recorder' about half a century ago (ISTR it was a whole 12 quid). The recorder's long since been chucked out but I still have a few tape recordings that were made on that machine (3 inch spools with 600 feet of triple play tape).
I recently auditioned some of them on my ancient Akai M8 (1 7/8, 3
3/4 and 7 1/2 ips speeds). The 1 7/8 ips speed is too slow with the 3 3/4 ips being too fast (but better sounding than too slow). The speed variation due to reel table drive was nowhere near as obvious as I'd have expected.One of these days, I'm going to digitise them by playing them back at
3 3/4 ips on my venerable Akai GX630DB tape deck so I can post process them back to some semblence of their proper playback speed.
I wonder if that's right, though. At one level, you can "understand" how a reel-to-reel recorder works, but in reality you can dig deeper and deeper into the technicalities until hardly anyone can understand it. Just the design of the recording head might embody an entire career's worth of R&D. And then you've got all the electronics - bias, Dolby NR, equalisation, etc. Then there's the choice of materials - plastics, metals, resin-bonded stuff - for the mechanics, the case, etc.
I think you can probably do much the same thing with an MP3 recorder. You could "explain" and "understand" it in a sentence, or you can dig deeper and deeper into the technicalities.
I guess the 19th century pioneers had to understand radio (for example) at the physics level. Then in the early 20th century most people who understood radio understood it at the component level. Now techies might understand it at the module level. And so on.....
I suggest that almost everything is readily understandable at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, and almost nothing is readily understandable at a sufficiently deep level of detail.
I've got a collection of 4GB DAT cartridges (uncompressed capacity) along with the DAT backup drive which I'd picked up at a bargain price of 200 quid perched in amongst the dusty collection of other such detritus on top of a roller shutter cupboard in my home office cum workshop.
I've even hung onto the Adaptec AHA 2940/2940U scsi adapter card (PCI so still a doable 'add on' in a modern box - I thought it was an ISA card until I had a closer look) which, fortuitously, has been acting as a "Dust Cover" to prevent dust ingress through the vent holes and carriage slide slots in the top of the drive casing.
The best you can do is estimate what it would require to digitise the recordings with suitably matched sample rate and bit depth.
If it's a dolby encoded recording at 3 3/4 ips on Maxell UDB tape on an excellent tape deck such as as a fettled ('cos it _was_ broken by design!) Akai GX630DB reel to reel tape deck, a fair assumption would be to use the CD based sample rate and bit depth to calculate its GB equivilent of digital storage.
A 10 inch reel with 3,600 foot of tape at 3 3/4 ips gives a total each way of 3 hours and 12 minutes which is a grand total of 384 minutes. A minute's worth of CD audio quality represents some
10.0937MiB's worth. translating the 384 minute figure gives us a total of 3.785GiB. It's a rather sobering thought that the box used to store that ten inch reel of tape would easily store thousands of 4GB microSD cards!Of course, an older metal headed tape recorder without dolby NR using older tape formulations such as Scotch Dynarange and EMI tape using the 3 3/4 ips speed[1] would only need a 32KHz sampling rate at 16 bits per sample (2.746GiB's worth).
In both cases, a conversion to a lossless compression format such as FLAC will produce an even lower (but more accurate) memory equivilent.
[1] around the equivilent performance of a high quality cassette deck with accurately aligned dolby level. Realistically, a C90 TDK SA tape would only manage the equivilent of 700MiB of storage.
That is so good it ought to be in your .sig
everybody knows how a car works, you sit in it, turn the key, engage a gear and steer with the wheel
What could be simpler than that?
Only if you need to fix it when it doesn't work do you need a bit more.
To design it, you need a hell of a lot more.
Operator: technician: designer.
Three very different levels.
This might be an urban legend but I heard that the inventor of the CD was a big Beethoven fan, and one of the design criteria was that the Ninth had to fit on one disc.
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