Analogue warmth

[thumb5]

Not sure whether this is really Tweaker's Corner fare, but:

This article was recently linked to on the Roon forum: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/analogue-warmth.

I found it interesting and thought other folk here might too.  It's written mainly for people producing music, but still a good read for those who just enjoy listening.

[f1eng]

Excellent, thanks for that.
As an amateur making recordings for nearly 60 years I had heard these differences and knew the sources of some but not all and not in all this detail. Splendid.

[simplicate]

Not sure whether this is really Tweaker's Corner fare, but:

This article was recently linked to on the Roon forum: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/analogue-warmth.

I found it interesting and thought other folk here might too.  It's written mainly for people producing music, but still a good read for those who just enjoy listening.

Great article. Thank you

[watchnerd]

Not sure whether this is really Tweaker's Corner fare, but:

This article was recently linked to on the Roon forum: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/analogue-warmth.

I found it interesting and thought other folk here might too.  It's written mainly for people producing music, but still a good read for those who just enjoy listening.

Great article. Thank you

Good article, but 7 years old now. The software plugins have gotten much better and there are more of them.

[Blackmorec]

Not sure whether this is really Tweaker's Corner fare, but:

This article was recently linked to on the Roon forum: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/analogue-warmth.

I found it interesting and thought other folk here might too.  It's written mainly for people producing music, but still a good read for those who just enjoy listening.

Great article. Thank you

Good article, but 7 years old now.  The software plugins have gotten much better and there are more of them.

[Blackmorec]

With the utmost respect to the OP, this sounds like a load of rubbish. It’s just a rehash of the old Tube vs. Solid-State debate
Analog warmth isn’t the addition of artefacts to the sound, rather its ‘lack’ is the removal of ‘naturalness’. Like trying to reproduce the smell and atmosphere of a pine forest, you can analyse and remix the components of the ‘smell’ all you want but you’ll never artificially recreate that special magic and you’ll always prefer the real thing. 
In digital, you’re not listening to music, you're listening to maths. It’s far, far removed from the original music
Take a great analog system, reduce or remove as many of the artefacts as possible discussed in the article and does it sound more like digital? No. It sounds more like the original, in other words it doesn’t loose warmth, rather it gains in naturalness. 
The first attempt at digital sounded horrible. Over the years that gap has closed and it now sounds less horrible and at times quite excellent. But a good turntable with ALL its physical limitations and clunky ‘antique’ technology still sounds better. Added artefacts? No. Less subtractions.....less distance between  the original and reproduction. How do you improve analog? Less of everything discussed in the article....not their addition.

[watchnerd]

With the utmost respect to the OP, this sounds like a load of rubbish. It’s just a rehash of the old Tube vs. Solid-State debate
Analog warmth isn’t the addition of artefacts to the sound, its the removal of ‘naturalness’. Like trying to reproduce the smell and atmosphere of a pine forest. You can analyse the components of the ‘smell’ all you want but you’ll never artificially recreate that special magic and you’ll always prefer the real thing. 
In digital, you’re not listening to music, you're listening to maths. It’s far, far removed from the original music
Take a great analog system, reduce or remove as many of the artefacts as possible discussed in the article and does it sound more like digital? No. It sounds more like the original. 
The first attempt at digital sounded horrible. Over the years that gap has closed and it now sounds less horrible and at times quite excellent. But a good turntable with ALL its physical limitations and clunky ‘antique’ technology still sounds better. Added artefacts? No. Less subtractions.....less distance between  the original and reproduction. How do you improve analog? Less of everything discussed in the article....not their addition.

Wow, so much voodoo and bad science in this post.

[f1eng]

With the utmost respect to the OP, this sounds like a load of rubbish. It’s just a rehash of the old Tube vs. Solid-State debate
Analog warmth isn’t the addition of artefacts to the sound, rather its ‘lack’ is the removal of ‘naturalness’. Like trying to reproduce the smell and atmosphere of a pine forest, you can analyse and remix the components of the ‘smell’ all you want but you’ll never artificially recreate that special magic and you’ll always prefer the real thing. 
In digital, you’re not listening to music, you're listening to maths. It’s far, far removed from the original music
Take a great analog system, reduce or remove as many of the artefacts as possible discussed in the article and does it sound more like digital? No. It sounds more like the original, in other words it doesn’t loose warmth, rather it gains in naturalness. 
The first attempt at digital sounded horrible. Over the years that gap has closed and it now sounds less horrible and at times quite excellent. But a good turntable with ALL its physical limitations and clunky ‘antique’ technology still sounds better. Added artefacts? No. Less subtractions.....less distance between  the original and reproduction. How do you improve analog? Less of everything discussed in the article....not their addition.

Sorry the article is correct and you are not.
I have both worked in the business plus been an amateur recordist for over 50 years.
You have obviously never made a recording from microphones and compared the microphone output to the output of the recorder.
Even the finest reel-to-reel recorders I used, even spending considerable time and expertise getting a good compromise of level setting between tape overload and hiss are not transparent to their input - ie the output of the recorder does NOT sound like the microphone feed. A digital recorder can produce an output indistinguishable to the microphone feed, and even the fairly early ones could, so this idea or early digital not being good is a myth perpetuated by people who have done no recording of their own.
The shortcomings of LPs (they are not even as accurate as the reel-to-reel tapes) were well known to the people working in the business when I joined in in 1975 and are capable of explaining all the euphonic aspects of LP replay so many enthusiasts (including me) enjoy.
I have sufficient experience to know it is the shortcomings of LPs I like and don't pretend there is some other mysterious magic aspect which is yet undiscovered by man.
If you don't like digital either your system isn't transparent or you don't like what the engineer and artist released, because with digital you get exactly that and there are few ways to tune it to taste, whereas with record players there are not only cartridges almost as transparent as CD but also ones with tailored responses, some slightly, some extreme, so you can change the sound to quite a long way from that the engineer/artist released if you so wish.

[Blackmorec]

No doubt if we all listened to microphone feeds and master tapes digital would be universally recognised as superior to analog. Unfortunately we don’t. We are fed a diet of down sampled digital radio, compressed files and CDs, and quite frankly a well recorded analog LP from the 60s or 70 knocks those into a cocked hat. Worse, digitally recorded LPs sound significantly inferior to their analog counterparts. Look at the used record market. The average prices for well recorded analog is 2 or 3 times that of the digital equivalent. That’s not because the digital sounds superior, quite the opposite. The old digital sonic signature may be clean, but its also typically hard, cold and somewhat electronic, lacking analog’s naturalness, musicality and warmth.
I sold my Analog system years ago when space limitations dictated downsizing, so I replaced my Turntable and Phono amp with a CDP. To this day I still play a CD that I used to listen to on vinyl and notice that it sounds inferior.
There’s no doubt that digital has come a long way.....but adding artefacts to digital recording to try and emulate some imagined distortions in analog is IMO travelling down the wrong road. What we need to do is to find better alternatives to all the digital processing that currently robs digitally processed music of its warmth.

[thumb5]

...
There’s no doubt that digital has come a long way.....but adding artefacts to digital recording to try and emulate some imagined distortions in analog is IMO travelling down the wrong road. What we need to do is to find better alternatives to all the digital processing that currently robs digitally processed music of its warmth.

The distortions that cause "warmth" in analog recordings are real, not imaginary. It's hard to argue with the fact that digital recording methods are objectively more accurate (in the sense of reproducing the original signal) than analogue, as f1eng pointed out above. So it's not the case that digital processing "robs...music of its warmth", rather that analog methods add it in the form of euphonic distortion.

Whether you prefer the warmth caused by such distortion is a personal and subjective matter - it seems that you do, which is fine by me so long as you accept that others have different preferences and neither is right or wrong. Whether it's a good thing to use DSP to emulate analog distortion is a different matter again - fair game, I say, if it helps the engineer achieve the sound he or she is looking for.