Digital has caught up and surpassed analog. You forget... analog = friction. Where there is friction there is unneeded noise. Not so with digital. Analog is on its way out my friend. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news.

seriously. those cars sound the way every guitar ought to.

art is like a person's individual taste in food, drinks and women, it is best not to try to understand it, it only cheapens the moment ;)


not true. the digital remastering can more easily remove tape noise then it can overcome its own inherent flaws in regards to clipping and its limits in audio capacities. Sounds waves vibrate at much more minute frequency differentials then computer technology can convert such things into 1s and 0s (trust me, your ear should be able to hear the difference) .. sure, the technology can reproduce a recorded sound with crystal clarity, but I have yet to hear a purely digital recording of analog, live instruments (hip-hop and electronic music is different of course) that can reproduce the same true-to-ear sound that a good tape can capture..

but I am a musician, my bias is trying to capture obscure sounds out of my head and a few peak moments on my instruments and get them on tape, and in my experience, listening to both live music, listening to bands recording and rehearsing, and in my own recording efforts, I rarely hear straight-to-digital recordings what I hear in real life with my decent two ears.
like I said, I prefer the best of both worlds. Record on tape to get the best sound possible, then use digital tools to sharpen it up, its not really that much an issue, it is the preference of many many folks already, despite what Bobby Digital told y'all ;)

Uhm... suchfriends, aren't you the one who listens to all his mp3s at 56kbps and can't notice the difference? I don't understand how you can see the audible differences in digital and analog recording but can't hear how shitty a 56kbps mp3 sounds like.

You might want to speak up there, Derek, he's deaf from the....

LOUDNESS WARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

...

For some reason, I can just see Beavis and Butthead screaming this. You know, like on those Friday night episodes? "IT'S FRIDAY NIIIIIIIIIIIGHTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!" Yeah.

I have a recording of Shostakovich's 13st by the Netherlands Radio Phil conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. (BIS SACD 1543). It's the best-recorded CD I own. Honestly, it's fucking incredible the range they get out of it. It's the sort of CD I wish I had a properly top-of-the-range-stereo for. And it's recorded DDD. I really think it's a very old-world attitude that says that analogue recording is the best. If digital is good enough for the classical world - and these are the people who can often perceive intervals smaller than 1/128th of a tone, just to give you an idea of their ear-capacity - I think it's probably good enough for some goit with a guitar.

OT, In case anyone's interested in their hearing, this is a test to find out how good your pitch perception is, and there's links to other tests. I got 0.4875 Hz as my final score. There are other tests for other musically related things as well.

I only really mention this because I sort of sympathise with people saying it doesn't really matter; except to say that Death Magnetic is one of the most shocking examples of a record sounding like a pile of shit. Herr Park's mentioning noise reminds me of when I used to work in an office where we could listen to music. I listened to Merzbow's 1930 at a fairly loud volume; I followed that with Avril Lavigne's second, and it was unbearably loud. 'Noise' is sort of a misnomer, in a sense, because Merzbow is quite keen on keeping his huge dynamic range, while most major labels bands are habitually obliterating that.

I want to name my next album 'Some Goit with a Guitar'.

Go for it, no credit requested.

Argh, I got 0.975 but there are 2 tvs on and I'm listening with no headphones and with not enough attention, I think.
I'll look into those tests, seems like a nice link, even if I haven't got the time to investigate how reliable the tests and the results can be considered.

Loudness war: I can't think about something meaningful to add, except that production is more important than most people think.

I'm wise.

gotta go, next week your package will leave my country.

ha ha I just told my brother to take the test and I noticed there's a "replay" button, I didn't use it before...oh well, I'm going to bed anyway-

1.275... wahhhhh.

I exaggerated a bit, but I was waiting for you to add this to the mix ;)




You are right I suppose, the catch for me with all-digital recording is that it has to be done fucking superbly, with top notch equipment and a bad ass motherfucking engineer and an even better production crew. A lot of the all digital shit I hear is crap, at any bit rate. And I just can't enjoy digitally recorded vocals..

but I must admit I am a 2-3 years behind on digital recording technology, and that shit has been evolving at light speed so they just may have gotten better, but I hang around a bunch of analog cats..

Surprised you could even notice it was in the mix har har har.

Eh, if you're listening to music that is reliant on production, then yeah. I think Slowdive... and quite a few electronic groups... rely on good production... but very very few bands treat a studio like a tool, and just usually use it to go in and record and that's that.. there'll always be little beefs I have with records.. "oh, the bass is too quiet.. oh the vocals are too loud" But like I said, a good song with shit production is still worth listening to, for me..

See, I'd say that whether a band cares or not, production is inseparable from the song. It's that thing of hearing demoes versus the finished product - it's rare the demo is better than the finished tune. It's that thing of how lo-fi started off as an 'anti-production' thing, but quickly became little more than a production preset. I wouldn't say there's nothing left to do with songs any more - but I'd also say that the differences between one three-chord pop song and another are largely down to production - whether it's choice of effects pedal or production processing thereof. Partially, this is why I'm quite precious about my own music - I fucking hate self-producing, because I'm shit at it, and I can't really afford the sort of equipment I want, and I haven't the inclination to work at it (playing takes up enough of my time as it is, without adding production to 'musical things I'm learning').

Like that Daughter of Darkness record - it's great, but there's peaks and stuff all over it that always make me wish they'd spent a bit more money on it. I think that's part of the charm for a lot of people, but I suspect it's a bit overlooked because of little imperfections like that.

I usually prefer demos. And Daughters of Darkness... some of the "peaks and stuff" might be because of the shitty tape rip.

Usually when I think about production and how important it is, I tend to think about that Slint record Tweez. I don't really think a whole lot of that record though some of the tracks are pretty cool. But I have some live shows on the computer here where they play those Tweez tracks and they aren't um, Albini-ized like they are on Tweez and they're much more enjoyable to listen to. To go further, comparing the version of Rhoda that's on Tweez to the version that's on the EP, I can't imagine anyone NOT picking the EP version.

So that's usually the example I think of when I want to convince myself that yeah, the production is important.

yeah but they did a lot of stupid things on Tweez like record them throwing dishes around and shit.

Albini has this habit of wrecking records. I don't know if it's bands not telling him what they want or just him, but he's made some utterly shockingly bad records. That Stooges record was just hideous.

It'd be really interesting to hear the results of a producer working completely out of their genre, like Rudy Van Gelder working with Eyehategod, or Albini recording a symphony orchestra. It'd be interesting to see just how much (or little) difference it would actually make to the final recording.

Since symphonies are often recorded with two mics in an acoustically excellent room, Albini might do just fine.