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Thank you, that's a very informative post. I didn't know Steely Dan tried to record Gaucho digitally but abandoned the experiment — still sounds mighty fine to me! I seem to recall Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop was bruited as an all-digital recording, and that was 1979.
HarmanMogul-
The early digital recordings were incredibly expensive from the sound of the machines they were creating. I've lived through a fair bit of computer audio starting with the BBC B. That was when a tape player recorded and played back your programs. That was early 80's so I've no idea what the big studios were up to before that, there must have been some cool systems around though.
Whenever the conversation turns to digital rates I recommend reading Dan Lavrys' white paper on the subject.
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Steely Dan tried to record Gaucho digitally but abandoned the experiment — still sounds mighty fine to me!
Listening to this now. Thanks for the recommendation.
Airhead
mashton
Studios have been at 96/24 for a long time. 64bit internal busses are pretty standard for DAWs. Early digital recording used stuff like converted betamax machines (Cowboy Junkies - Trinity Sessions). Donald Fagan - The Nightfly is a good example of early digital, they had tried to record Gaucho digitally but stuck with tape. The Nightfly was 16bit the system had just been updated from 8 bit.
I do understand the way tape works but the compression that any analog recording system can create due to the way it overloads has nothing to do with the bit rate you are using to digitally represent the files.
Tape has a theoretical dynamic range which is far lower than the theoretical dynamic range of a 96/24 recording but again the reason to record at 96/24 is not to increase the dynamic range but to reduce the problems caused by aliasing harmonics appearing in the audible spectrum.
I understand you have a different viewpoint. From my side of things 96/24 is a baseline, it's actually easier to maintain that as a standard throughout my system. I would say that there are many things to worry about before DSD or MQA becomes a thing to worry about but I've been and done worried about the other stuff. Last weekend I was recording a band, 16 tracks of 96/24 to an iPad from my PA mixer, it's not a massive overhead these days.
As far as MP3 etc is concerned there are times when I don't notice the difference and times when I do, the main thing that annoys me is overly compressed music, even if it's 96/24 it will annoy me if there's not enough dynamic range. So in that way we can agree, there are bigger fish to fry.