It's sad to see a recording engineer fall for the roundly debunked "stairsteps" myth.
Oversampling eliminated the need for steep lowpass filters in DACs over 30 years ago. And if you really want to reproduce frequencies only bats can hear, hi-res sampling rates have been in common use for over 20 years.
And as for reproducing frequencies
below the range of human hearing, try cutting a 5 Hz square wave on vinyl and let me know how that works out for you...
WillVT's brother here.
Ok, so this was an email to my brother-- not a forum post. I know the whole "roundly debunked stair step myth". Believe me, it's been discussed in our world a time or two /s. (the "analog is bad" folks always get the most upset and mean) However, aliasing is real, and there's a reason it's called a SAMPLE rate, and there's a reason that 44,100 times per second is the minimum rate for it to reproduce accurately for our hearing. I wasn't trying to write a novel to my brother about the article he sent me, so I said that as sort of a layman's term. However, to act like digital audio is not a series of "snapshots" is just plain wrong. This is why in production we need to be concerned about inter-sample peaks when we are mastering and getting close to 0 dbfs. Does that mean that digital audio is bad or you can hear it? No, and I didn't say that. I just like how analog tape works.
Believe it or not, many popular audio plugins that run in the DAWs that make the music you listen to, do not oversample. Many do, but those ones that don't are sending distortions back down into the audible range.
As far as your 5hz comment, I was referring to the gentle rolloff that my tape machines do, I'm not cutting 5hz to vinyl, so that's a ridicules comment....especially with vinyl's limitations. 44.1 due to Nyquist cuts sharply at 22khz, while my Otari at 15ips will
gently roll off somewhere over 30khz. Can anybody blind test and hear that? No, but I can still like that it's happening. Obviously I know about hi res sample rates, I use them for that reason.
Anyways, my brother's original comment was about emotion and art and allowing imperfection. I don't give a sh** about the digital vs analog argument. I use digital every day, and for clients that want it, I record to tape.. However, I think you hifi guys tend to be unaware of the huge differences on the creation side of music of either format, instead thinking that our only considerations are of a technical nature. Here are a few of the major ones: 1) you don't do infinite takes on tape 2) You don't stare at a screen on tape. When there is a DAW running, everybody in the control room is staring at its GUI. There is research showing that stimuli into one sense takes away from the others. With tape you just listen. 3) Less editing capability on tape, so human performance has a higher value. More imperfections of performance are tolerated or work done until it is good, whereas in the DAW it's so easy to fix everything, and hard to not do it knowing you can. Same for tuning, etc. 4) many of us like the sound of tape. I have yet to find a tape simulation plugin that comes close to what it does to transients like drums.
I see other comments saying people prefer imperfect and "dirty" analog sounding recordings because they've been conditioned to it from previous recorded music. Perhaps, but I have another 2 part theory-- one for distion, and one for noise floor. The world we live in is full of audio distortions...even our eardrums will distort at loud volumes. Reflections, filters, things rattling, that's the real world. Why did live sax players in the be-bop era start to do the growl kind of sound? Why did guitar players start to distort amps in the 50s? Why did djembe players in Africa put rattling metal things on their drums? Singers distorting their voice to be gravely... Snares on drums....etc etc. Because people liked the sound of it!! It is the sound of harmonics and overtones, and anything that's not a pure sine wave has them. So that's distortion, now for noise floor, which is where digital really performs better than tape. My theory here starts with the fact that the world always has a noise floor. Being in an anechoic chamber can make people sick...we have not evolved to be in that environment. In fact we have evolved to be able to pick specific sounds out of "the noise". The hiss of tape, the sound of rain....some people have even "heard" this sound while on psychedelic journeys, and refer to it as the sound of the universe or something. Anyways, I consider some amount of noise floor to be important in my productions. Some plugins that emulate analog gear make this hiss, and I've had clients request more noise floor.
I think all of you would be surprised how much of the modern studio-- both outboard analog gear and "in the box" plugins are for saturation, which is the new chosen word for distortion. The most famous compressors, preamps, and microphones are loved for their unique non-linearities. Transformers and tubes. Even the seemingly clean sounding pop mixes you hear are using tons of saturation in small doses all over the mix, just as he stated in the article. So in conjunction with the creative workflow difference I mentioned above, it should be no surprise that musicians and engineers still use analog recording mediums.
They have the - " cosmic energy - yeah bash! "
