19-Oct-2015, 11:23
Well I know my view is not held by quite a few members of the audiophile community, but as an amateur recordist of live music for the last 50+ years with tape recorders from old valve mono ones, via a Revox B77, Nakamich CR7E, Stelladat to modern ADC/DACs by Metric Halo it is my experience that all the analogue methods add some colouration - tape saturation sounds quite pleasant if not overdone, for example - whereas the digital ones I have used add little or none, certainly I am not able to discern any difference between the microphone feed and the ADC/DAC of my Metric Halo recorder on the sort of things I used to record.
So, based on this experience I am quite sure of two things, firstly I have never heard a transparent analogue system and I do not believe such a thing exists, the colourations can be greater or smaller but except for speed fluctuations pretty well always euphonic. Secondly a properly engineered ADC/DAC has minimal colourations and, in fact, I have never heard a difference of any consequence between the input and output of any of the digital recording systems I have used, and recent ones are completely transparent IME.
People who really like the added colourations of analogue systems and have got used to them are not going to like something audibly transparent. One of the most popular plug-ins in the Metric Halo toolbox is an analogue tape saturation emulator, for example...
Further to this, and relevant in that music is sound data, I have been recording and analysing engineering data since 1971. The first data recorders I used were all analogue, huge, heavy but fairly accurate in a lab environment as long as they were re-calibrated daily. I used them on vibration measurements on large gearboxes, then record players. When I went into Formula 1 motor racing in 1976 very little measurement had ever been done. I did some experiments but nothing as big as the Ampex recorder I used for vibration measurement would fit. We made our own small unit, but the limited number of channels and harsh environment meant the results were of limited use.
Then a way of recording data digitally became available, made by an ex-NASA engineer who branched out on his own in around 1981 and very expensive (1 megabyte of RAM cost £1000 in 1986, making my iPhone worth £128,000,000 at 1980s prices...) and was very slow but reliable and accurate.
It is all fairly straightforward and relatively inexpensive today but the fact is that none of the analogue methods were robust or accurate enough for recording data on a Formula 1 car, whereas the digital systems are, when properly engineered.
So, based on this experience I am quite sure of two things, firstly I have never heard a transparent analogue system and I do not believe such a thing exists, the colourations can be greater or smaller but except for speed fluctuations pretty well always euphonic. Secondly a properly engineered ADC/DAC has minimal colourations and, in fact, I have never heard a difference of any consequence between the input and output of any of the digital recording systems I have used, and recent ones are completely transparent IME.
People who really like the added colourations of analogue systems and have got used to them are not going to like something audibly transparent. One of the most popular plug-ins in the Metric Halo toolbox is an analogue tape saturation emulator, for example...
Further to this, and relevant in that music is sound data, I have been recording and analysing engineering data since 1971. The first data recorders I used were all analogue, huge, heavy but fairly accurate in a lab environment as long as they were re-calibrated daily. I used them on vibration measurements on large gearboxes, then record players. When I went into Formula 1 motor racing in 1976 very little measurement had ever been done. I did some experiments but nothing as big as the Ampex recorder I used for vibration measurement would fit. We made our own small unit, but the limited number of channels and harsh environment meant the results were of limited use.
Then a way of recording data digitally became available, made by an ex-NASA engineer who branched out on his own in around 1981 and very expensive (1 megabyte of RAM cost £1000 in 1986, making my iPhone worth £128,000,000 at 1980s prices...) and was very slow but reliable and accurate.
It is all fairly straightforward and relatively inexpensive today but the fact is that none of the analogue methods were robust or accurate enough for recording data on a Formula 1 car, whereas the digital systems are, when properly engineered.
Devialet Original d'Atelier 44 Core, Job Pre/225, Goldmund PH2, Goldmund Reference/T3f /Ortofon A90, Goldmund Mimesis 36+ & Chord Blu, iMac/Air, Lynx Theta, Tune Audio Anima, Goldmund Epilog 1&2, REL Studio. Dialog, Silver Phantoms, Branch stands, copper cables (mainly).
Oxfordshire
