Attn: All musicians! Analog recording at STUDIO 330?

10/18/2014

I am thinking of including an analog system that consists of a vintage mixing board and a professional grade multitrack tape machine at STUDIO 330. I am aquiring a vintage Soundcraft 400B 24 channel/4 bus mixing board that can feed into our digital setup as well as into a possible 8 track 1" tape machine. Why only 1" tape? Because of tape cost: 2" tape is $300 per reel, while 1" is, guess, about half.

But I want Your opinion on this- is there an interest in having access to an analog setup? Drop me a line with your opinion! You can reach me at allemande@charter.net.

2 Comments

Barbra

10/18/2014 02:36:59 am

Vintage is always appealing.

Carl H

12/2/2014 12:55:33 am

I can only comment from an 'end-user' perspective, by saying yes, true analog recordings are VERY appealing and almost always surpass all-digital recordings assuming the requisite level of equipment and technique.

Listening to, for example, “A Meeting by the River” (on the ‘Waterlily’ label), there's an organic and natural texture to this purely acoustic music that would almost certainly be minimized/lost had the recording been made and processed through modern fully digital equipment.
Tim De Paravacini at EAR makes exceptional equipment for the recording industry and I always enjoy the sound of anything touched by his hands.
There is something of a paradox however, because I've heard DDD recordings which sound very good and quite close to analog. Even the recording touted as the first ever commercial Direct Digital (Ry Cooder's 'Bop 'Til You Drop') actually sounds pretty good on a decent playback system. So I guess a lot of the dross that we hear from full digital isn't always necessarily a function of the digital process, but more down to a limitation of the engineering and recording techniques/skills involved in the process?

Anyway, I vote for analog!

Attn: All musicians! Analog recording at STUDIO 330?

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