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Is tape really making a comeback?


Hardbopjazz

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1 hour ago, bresna said:

And again, if you create a digital file with a high enough sampling rate, then the analog waveform can be perfectly replicated. There's no "closer". It can be the exact same. You can say that you heard a before and after with a standard 16/44.1 "CD quality" digital conversion, but it's likely whatever was fed to the analog to digital converter wasn't that good.

But those are two different points.

No, a sample is not EXACTLY the same (unless you can do the quantums and physically prove that the analog also has microscopic but undetectable to the make ears gaps). I don't care how small/undetectable the gaps are, they're still gpas.

And yes, digital is now good enough that it's not only "undetectable" from analog, it's quite often better sounding than analog in terms of accuracy.

But it's not the same. If it was, then digital = analog, and we both know that's not a true equation.

Or maybe we have a different understanding of what "replicate" means.

In the end, I don't care except as a random semantics thing, really. I'm getting older, my ears are often tired before they even get started, and the same is even truer for my mind. So in the end, fuck it, let's all jsut play our records, simple as that.

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Jim - you're mixing up the sampled soundwave with the soundwave that comes out of the other end of the digital to analog conversion. Using a CD player as an example, the signal coming out of the analog outputs does not have "undetectable gaps". That's not how the digital to analog conversion process works. It's not a simple process that just converts those small chunks of data to small chunks of analog waveform. It uses algorithms that stitch these pieces back together seamlessly to recreate the waveform that was encoded with the digital bits.

The digital and analog conversion processes are both well understood. As long as you take enough samples at a high enough rate of speed, you can replicate the waveform exactly. There are plenty of papers on this.

But let's get back to reel to reel anyway. We've had enough digital versus analog discussions on these boards already. I would probably still have a reel to reel deck today if it had managed to stick around past ~1978, when I was getting heavily into audio. But by the end of the 70's, reel to reel tape production was really only popular in the classical music genre, which was not my thing then, and they weren't being sold in any of the record stores where I shopped. And cassette tape recording was proving to be able to make a decent sounding recording if done right.

I'm still trying to figure out what Chuck has against the cassette tape. I had a pretty nice cassette set-up back in the day so I may be biased, but low cost was not the reason why I got into it. The Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck that I used to drool over certainly was not cheap. With the right deck and the right tapes, you could get a pretty nice sounding system. From Chuck's sigh, I guess he had less success than I did.

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Recreate is just that - a recreation. It's not the original. And even though analog is itself certainly a transformative recreation, a recreation of a recreation is still one step removed, logically. Let's just not make those leaps of logic, please. It might take centuries for them to unravel, but unravel they will, and then what will you have? A bunch of people who have redfined "is" to fit what they believe they know. WE WILL ALL BE GODS OF OUR OWN MAKINGS!!!!!

Now, if you want to say that digital can imitate analog but analog can't imitate digital, that's fine. I concur completely.

But don't get all test-tube baby about "recreating" analog via digital, please.

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I don't how far you want to go down this rabbit hole but let's take it to the extreme... you hear digitally. How's that you say? Well, your eardrum converts sound waves to nerve impulses that your brain interprets as "sound". Your nervous system transmits this via nerve impulses. The word "impulse" is specific in that it has a rapid rise and a rapid fall. From a 0 to a 1. Digital defined. So your brain is converting digital to what you perceive as analog all the time.

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Pretty sure there's a lot between that 0 and that 1 (like, infinity), and that the brain is able to process all of it in one way or another, and also that there are other parts of the body besides the ear that are sensitive to "sound waves". Life is a full body (and probably a lot more) experience.

This willingness to roll over and play baby for the digital paradigm...it's probably true that we've passed the point of no return there, but I'm less than convinced that it's gonna be a bright bright sunshiny day as a result.

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On 5/11/2020 at 7:01 PM, bresna said:

Tape does not capture sound vibrations. A microphone captures those vibrations and converts them to a signal that's electronically encoded to magnetic tape. There is "conversion" here too. The ability of that magnetic tape to capture those wavefroms is also limited by the tape medium. It cannot capture all frequencies equally, which is why they tweaked the format over the years, adding things like high bias tape and the use of noise reduction to mask those weaknesses.

And again, if you create a digital file with a high enough sampling rate, then the analog waveform can be perfectly replicated. There's no "closer". It can be the exact same. You can say that you heard a before and after with a standard 16/44.1 "CD quality" digital conversion, but it's likely whatever was fed to the analog to digital converter wasn't that good.

As for cassette tape vs. reel to reel, I didn't mean to imply that cassette was a better playback medium, just that it was designed to minimize a lot of the mechanical problems inherent with its big brother.

this is missing the point; if you transfer an analog original to digital, yes, then the analog wave form can be perfectly replicated; but what you are replicating is the original analog sound. That is MUCH different than making a digital original.

All else being equal - digital original at 24 bit; well-maintained analog machine at 15 IPS, no noise reduction - I prefer analog. I realize how subjective it can be.

The other weird thing, and this is from someone who has been recording things for about 40 years; what I miss about analog is that with it you could stick a mic in front of a bunch of players and, if the recorder was good, get amazingly good sound and balance with very little effort. This is much harder to achieve with digital; hard to explain but it is prone to more unpleasant distortion and it is just harder to achieve a natural air-like acoustic balance. This, too, has improved with 24 bit, however. And I miss some of the really terrific cassette recorders I used over the years, some of which sounded incredibly clean and warm.

Edited by AllenLowe
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If reel to reel was making a comeback, I would think that at least one band on bandcamp.com would list a recording on the format. I cannot find any new music releases on reel to reel. Lots of cassette releases but not reel to reel.

The last reel to reel releases I read about were from The Tape Project. Until I found out about their prices for master tape replicas, I thought about getting into it for fun. But those prices are outrageous to me for something I was planning to do for fun. A few of these titles were very interesting: https://tapeproject.com/jazz/

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1 hour ago, bresna said:

If reel to reel was making a comeback, I would think that at least one band on bandcamp.com would list a recording on the format. I cannot find any new music releases on reel to reel. Lots of cassette releases but not reel to reel.

The last reel to reel releases I read about were from The Tape Project. Until I found out about their prices for master tape replicas, I thought about getting into it for fun. But those prices are outrageous to me for something I was planning to do for fun. A few of these titles were very interesting: https://tapeproject.com/jazz/

Well, it's expensive like a NM original pressing of some titles.

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11 hours ago, AllenLowe said:

this is missing the point; if you transfer an analog original to digital, yes, then the analog wave form can be perfectly replicated; but what you are replicating is the original analog sound. That is MUCH different than making a digital original.

All else being equal - digital original at 24 bit; well-maintained analog machine at 15 IPS, no noise reduction - I prefer analog. I realize how subjective it can be.

If "digital" can transparently reproduce the sound of an analog (e.g. reel-to-reel) recording, but not reality itself, it seems to suggest that there is a difference between reality and the analog recording, in other words that analog recordings are not transparent. 

So, if the resolution of "digital" (at an appropriate sample rate/bit depth), is enough to reproduce what is in the analog recording, it would seem that you should be able to add whatever non-transparence that "analog" is doing to the sound and have the same listening experience. Run it through a tape delay? 🙂

Edited by Daniel A
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I was over at the Steve Hoffman forums this morning and what do I see? A fairly long thread started by someone who was thinking about getting into Reel to Reel (also known as R2R apparently). It looks like there are a lot of users or former users contributing their opinions. An interesting read for sure: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/reel-to-reel-should-i-bother.506071

From reading this thread at the Hoffman forum, I am still glad that I never got into it. Most of the posters sounded relieved that they got out of R2R.

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I don’t understand the fascination with R2R, unless it’s a nostalgia craze. I still have a Sony tape recorder from the 1960s but I haven’t used it in at least 20 years. When I was a teenager my friend and I used to tape songs from the radio or records we’d borrow from other people, maybe even Radio Caroline (although I’m not sure, as we lived in Barcelona)  or the VOA/Armed Forces Radio.  Anyway, that was then.  

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50 minutes ago, Brad said:

I don’t understand the fascination with R2R, unless it’s a nostalgia craze. I still have a Sony tape recorder from the 1960s but I haven’t used it in at least 20 years. When I was a teenager my friend and I used to tape songs from the radio or records we’d borrow from other people, maybe even Radio Caroline (although I’m not sure, as we lived in Barcelona)  or the VOA/Armed Forces Radio.  Anyway, that was then.  

Yeah, I mean, it's a DIFFERENT sound to be sure, so maybe there's a thrill-seeking element to it. And yeah, in 1977, it was a GREAT sound (especially once you got to 15/ or 30 IPS). But jeez, anybody who wants to "bring it back" or whatever it is past a historical awareness... they just need to either grow up or else find that wormhole into the pre-digital 20th Century. Shit done moved on.

1 hour ago, jcam_44 said:

You may prefer the limitations that give analog recordings their sound but that does not make them a better recording medium. 

Ultimately, "better" is whatever gives you what you want. #thatkindofthing

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5 hours ago, Daniel A said:

If "digital" can transparently reproduce the sound of an analog (e.g. reel-to-reel) recording, but not reality itself, it seems to suggest that there is a difference between reality and the analog recording, in other words that analog recordings are not transparent. 

So, if the resolution of "digital" (at an appropriate sample rate/bit depth), is enough to reproduce what is in the analog recording, it would seem that you should be able to add whatever non-transparence that "analog" is doing to the sound and have the same listening experience. Run it through a tape delay? 🙂

maybe; hence all these modules that are supposed to add the "warmth of analog" to digital recordings. I am sure someone could explain the science better than I can, but yes, analog recording is still an analog to reality, not reality. And of course not all analog recording equipment is equal.

At the end of the day, yes, it is subjective, and it depends on what you want in a recording. To me, if the recording is of a group of performers standing or sitting around, I want it to replicate, as closely as possible, the "live" experience of sound as it travels and clashes harmonically and has depth. To me analog, in its highest state, is still best at this. Though the way things are historically, all these points are moot. Analog tape is not coming back (or at least I don't think it is).

So what I try to deal with when I record is the problem of multi-tracking and isolation, and the way in which such isolation is destructive - it takes all of the air/space out of a recording, and I have never, to this day, after about 20+ CDs, ever recorded with isolation (or compression).

 

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On 5/11/2020 at 4:01 PM, bresna said:

Tape does not capture sound vibrations. A microphone captures those vibrations and converts them to a signal that's electronically encoded to magnetic tape. There is "conversion" here too. The ability of that magnetic tape to capture those wavefroms is also limited by the tape medium. It cannot capture all frequencies equally, which is why they tweaked the format over the years, adding things like high bias tape and the use of noise reduction to mask those weaknesses.

And again, if you create a digital file with a high enough sampling rate, then the analog waveform can be perfectly replicated. There's no "closer". It can be the exact same. You can say that you heard a before and after with a standard 16/44.1 "CD quality" digital conversion, but it's likely whatever was fed to the analog to digital converter wasn't that good.

As for cassette tape vs. reel to reel, I didn't mean to imply that cassette was a better playback medium, just that it was designed to minimize a lot of the mechanical problems inherent with its big brother.

that is interesting

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