Reiki Music. Video Marketing

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the long arguments people had about the differences between vinyl records and digital compact disk.

The majority agreed that the digital version seemed to have more in it, particularly sparkle (and things they’d never noticed/heard before), but a significant percentage said (and some still say) that analogue still rules for depth and/or warmth and/or energy.

Of course there are various technical reasons why this can be true. But the reality was most people couldn’t tell the difference, most people don’t live in an A/B comparison world (or walk around with a perfect memory map of a live concert in their auditory memory) and the sound quality between a £300+ analogue hi-fi turntable and a £70 digital CD Player, is not a jump a lot of people could make anyway.

Anyway. Here we are a few decades later and on the other side of the (recording studio) glass, we have all become accustomed to using digital workstations and particularly desktop computers, running virtual studio software.

There has always been, and will probably always be, a segment of die hards (?) who swear by analogue tape, or valve compressors, or a particular decade oand revision of a microphone. More commonly are people who invest in DSP accelerated hardware (like the Universal Audio UAD-1 or the Creamware Scope platform) as it really seems to sound better, and more solid, than it’s native software only counter part.

Also the trend to invest in expensive esoteric microphone preamplifiers (or single hardware rack channels), as well as very high class A2D and D2A convertors, not to mention jittter-not-so-much master word clocks. It all seems to make a diference, to somebody at least.

The point is Digidesign have made quite a bold move recently and asked the question, how does digital and analogue compare now. They’ve provided (what they call) “professionally” mixed versions of the same material, one via a Digidesign Protools system, the other including a large format analogue console.

The exact experiment system and technique details are here.

What I hope you’ll find doing the A/B comparison for yourself, is 1) that there is a quite a phenomenal difference between them. And considering we’re only hearing a dumbed down, 16 bit, 44.1khz version, the fact that the difference remains so hugely, is quite amazing.

No doubt there will be a mix of reactions to which people thought was which version and then what each person “prefers”. The latter is a whole other can of worms.

My point is that having done the review myself, I am 100% sold back on analogue. Frighteningly so. And here’s why… in part 2

Digidesign Analogue vs Digital Experiment

One Response to “Brave marketing, Protools confuses the market…”