Analog Tape Vs. Digital Shootout

[Nikola]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgH99wyRoVc&feature=related]YouTube - Analog Tape Vs. Digital Shootout (Sample-Rate.com[/ame]

here are the files

http://www.sample-rate.com/analogvdig/digital.wav

http://www.sample-rate.com/analogvdig/analogday1.wav

http://www.sample-rate.com/analogvdig/analogday3.wav

[therealtruealtog]

Analog sounds way better than Digital. It isn't as much tinny, and sounds warm and rich.

[aisback]

analog has always felt more organic to me and digital just seems lifeless

[Ghostridah]

I love these kinds of posts, Thanks for posting Nik

He said transfers from analog to digital sound pretty damn good only minor differences. The only downside of analog is that its susceptible to environmental damage even if stored properly. As opposed to digital, it can be stored indefinitely with no quality loss.

I think the lesson here is to record on analog tape and transfer to a digital source. The digital source can be used for cds and mp3s, and the pure analog source can be transfered to vinyl.

on a side note that guy needs to stop using "air quotes" that much.

-edit here's a quote from their forum that clears up some misconceptions.

So, i was finally able to get my hands on a 24 track studer 2 inch tape machine (courtesy of SAE Institute), although i was a skeptic, i now am a huge fan of that analog warmth! but contrary to what most people say it is not a thing of overall quality, here is what we found in a test where we split a recording and sent the tracks to both Pro Tools and Tape, so that we had 2 identical performances, one on analog and one on digital. now it should be noted that the digital recording would be done at 24 Bit 48Khz and the analog recording would be done at 15ips (inches per second).

so for the initial test it was Analog Vs. Digital, and during the recording (before we even hit the tape) one thing became evident. the A/D and D/A conversion was obviously degrading the audio, listening to the tape (which in record is just a hard wire pass through), Vs, the Pro Tools feed, had a rather large difference (it should be noted that we were running at 24 bit 48K), the digital signal was duller, and wasn't as sharp as the analog signal. this was obviously caused by the sampling rate and bit depth limitations and the dither process.

once we had recorded it was on to playback.
immediately the analog sound has that "warmth" that everyone talks about, but contrary to the previous results, the digital recording was the closest to the original live sound. and on the analog the high end (on immediate playback) was clean and crisp. and the drum sounds we got has that grungy saturated tone to them on the tape, they sounded amazing! (i will be posting samples later) it became evident that the "analog" sound is not a fidelity thing, it is a coloration, and although that is a slight quality factor, it is not great enough to be noticed on the average consumer system.

so onto our next test, we wanted to know how much of that analog sound was lost when it was converted back to digital, so we took the digital recording, and sent it to analog tape, then recorded the analog back in to Pro tools. and amazingly enough it sounded almost identical to the original analog recording. so to test this we brought in a panel of 5 other engineers and had them identify which one was all digital, all analog and analog to digital.
of the 5 people tested, 4 could not identify the difference between the true analog and digital to analog, 5/5 identified the digital recording.

this experiment proves that it is the EQ coloration and Tape compression that contributes to that really awesome analog sound, but to take it one step further, i will be soon posting the audio here on SR and will also through in a couple of analog modeling plugins to compare and see what you think about that really awesome analog sound!

[Creation]

cool video, but the guy's voice annoys me

[KW]

I read through and watched, the links don't work so I can't hear for myself, re up?

[Nikola]

^Right click on link, select Save as, and there You go

load files into multi-channel software, match the volume level, then switch back and worth between digital and analog tape day 3.