Is outboard gear still viable?

I have abandoned my sonic pursuit using plug ins and using actual hardware now. So I for one, think it is extremely viable. The only thing that I use plug ins for currently is to get a quick mock of the mix to make sure the sound is moving in the general direction I want to pursue. I then take them off and run out to hardware for compression, summing and reverb.

ampfixer


I've had a few people recently  ask me about building old school outboard gear like tube preamps and compressors. I was under the impression that there was no real interest in this stuff anymore. It would be expensive to make but I've found suppliers for everything needed and I don't think it would be hard to build if I had some custom PCB's made.

I would very much like to hear from any users of tube gear and comparable hi end plug in's. Does outboard gear really improve the sound or is it something that people want in the studio as bling for the customers?

There's definitely a need and a call for it. As for outboard gear improving the sound, I would say that will always be in the ears of the beholder. I barely use any of my outboard gear and I have some killer stuff over here. I found that at times, analog warmth is not what I need in 2011. I have fought my entire life to have crystal clear recordings and analog can give you a bit of dirt when you jump on some of the stuff. Some guys like this and swear by it...some guys like me don't see the need. However, they are good tools to keep in your box if you are no longer an OTB man...which I am not.
 
I have found that just about anything I can do in the analog realm with hardware, I can do with software. It is NOT exact, but the differences to me, are not worth spending 5k on a Manley verses having the UAD version. I can color the sound of my stuff ITB to where it sounds so close...the little bit it's off is not a major difference nor does it warrant a pricey load of outboard gear any longer.
 
As for eye candy for customers...most definitely some of it plays a role there for some engineers. I know a guy that has about 100k worth of hardware processors that he barely uses anymore, yet instead of selling them...he keeps them because they look cool and he does use a little something from time to time.
 
Another thing I don't miss about some of the outboard gear is the noise you can sometimes pick up from them due to how they drive things in certain situations. That said, though it sounds as if I'm negative about outboard gear, I'm really not. I just don't see a reason or a need for my applications...and this is coming from a man that still uses tape from time to time. :) To me Amp, there is a certain sound in the digital realm that I like and welcome now. It took me about a year to enjoy it, but now that I do...I don't look back at analog unless it's a necessity. My epiphany came when I did a bunch of recordings using analog gear and then tried to simulate it using digital with plugs. I was nearly spot on in my experiment and liked the digital better due to it just being a bit more crisp in areas where I feel analog just sounds bad. The UAD plugs are the closest to analog in my opinion, but they are not the same. However, like I said, you can come so close you'd have to ask yourself "is it worth it for me to pay all this money for analog stuff when what I'm getting here is so close, only me and some engineer with super ears will hear it"?
 
As for you getting into this business...yeah, I think if you can make some sort of boutique tube pre's or comps, you'd have a good shot at this. Do something no one else has done...or something no one else has done quite right. You know what I'd love to see that might make me think about analog again? Somethng that allows us to save positions. You know...some sort of mechanism with motorized dials that allow us to save presets we create and recall them to memory. To my knowledge...no one is doing that in the analog world...so that may be a good start for you. :)
 
The reason I mention that...one thing I always hated about hybrid mixing (half in the box, half out) was if you were working on a few projects at once or whatever...you constantly had to write things down on your analog gear to recall it later. This really gets to be a drag now that I'm so used to saving presets and just recalling something with the click of a button. So yeah, this stuff is still viable and is a necessity to quite a few engineers at this time. With the way these modeler things are going though...I'd give it another 5-10 years before we may start to see people changing their minds. Then again...with the economy the way it is now...what do you do..save up for the Manley at 5k, or try the UAD version for under $300? It's so close...it's not even justified in my opinion. But, none of them are exact and emulate all the qualities of analog. Hope this helps...best of luck. :)
 
-Danny

Outboard gear will always have a place in studios. 

Walking into a room with racks of gear with flashing lights will always look better than just simply seeing a computer setting there. 

I mix 100% in the box so none of that applies to me. 

Most of the albums that still make the billboard chart are tracked on hardware. Less so the mixing stage. A U47, C800G, U67 into a Neve 1073 followed by a CL1B, LA2A or 1176 is not going away anytime soon for tracking on commercial releases.

Up until the economy dumped I'd venture to say that the pro audio products market was experiencing steady growth.

I enjoy paying for hardware.

I buy stuff that will be working well long after I am gone.

Every cent I spend on a software/firmware product seems like service to a lease on a product that I can be 100% certain will be worthless within a few years and unusable in a decade.


best regards,
mike

Like many others, I spend thousands on plugins (entranced by the fancy GUIs), but eventually dumped them and now use a small set of outboard gear. One consideration here is that the trend in modern music is screw the performance and composition, just get someone on disc and we can use a thousand plugins and all the stretching, tuning, hacking tools to make it sound like something. If that's your way of looking at music, then outboard hardware probably isn't for you.

Some of us still respect music and honesty in making music and we try to record it as it should sound. Under that sort of regime, a small set of high quality outboard gear can make a huge difference, because you are making decisions up front and applying the processing while it's still all purely in the analog world. So the computer becomes really just a storage mechanism, a digital tape deck, and the audio is only miminimally adjusted in any sort of digital way.

So, in this sort of scheme, which is very reasonable for the self recorder guy, not so much for the pro studio recording other people, you don't need a lot of gear, since you only need to enough to apply to whatever part you are recording at the moment. You aren't trying to replicate the thousand plugins used at mix time.

So one good pre-amp, one good EQ, and one flexible compressor can be enough to make a good start down this path. You can build your own, though it's probably not worth going full hog DIY because there are DIY kits out there already that are very nice and well worked out. I have a DIY 1176 and LA-2A and those are my primary tools. And I have a pair of Speck ASC-T EQs and a couple (very inexpensive) ART VLA II compressors as well. I have a Solo/610 tube pre-amp.

With even that small amount of equipment, and the willingness to actually learn to play and to make decisions up front about the parts you are tracking, you can almost completely treat the computer as a digital tape deck and nothing more. And I think that the quality of the music will be far better, because you are really hearing what it's going to sound like as you are playing, you can learn to mix yourself as you record, you are doing almost all processing purely in the analog realm, and you don't need 16 analog I/O and a wall of outboard gear to try to effectively replace the thousand plugins with a thousand pieces of hardware at mix time.
 
It does though require that you get out of the modern mindset of believing that it doesn't matter how the music is made, because the listener won't know the difference. Well, even if the listener doesn't, YOU know how it was made and I promise you you'll put more soul and pride into it this way than the modern way, and that is something that the listener can hear, even if he or she doesn't understand how it got in there.
 

For my experience, getting the sound into the DAW,  it is somtimes wise to use outboard gear, you can't beat a decent preamp with a compressor and EQ.

For my ears there is sooo much difference in mastering, I love my outboard compressor's and can really tell when I have mastered inside the box and when I have done a master with my Art Pro VLA II or my TL Audio A2.

The thing is and this is where we have all been going wrong esp on this forum over the last few weeks:  We are dealing with one of the most subjective artforms and what may sound like chocolate cake to you, may sound like dog turd to me.

So to answer your question: Yes.

Peace Ben

PS, this is coming from someone who REALLY believes in the digital revolution and I have been known to advocate some pretty crazy stuff when it comes to analog and the future of music.  The above statement is a bit of a throwback and could be considered a tradtionalist's veiw.

I have only succumbed to the digital revolution out of necessity. I would love to have all the analog gear that my digital gear supposes to be. And, a room to put it in. And, a technician to keep it all working and clean the pots and tape heads etc. yada yada.... That said, I don't use the analog gear I do have. It's just too easy to keep it in the box.

JeffinOz


The reason why many plugins don't sound as good as their analog counterparts is because people are using the wrong plugins! Simple as that. I totally agree with Danny on this. The UAD stuff is supposed to be the best and the closest thing right now to the hardware. More and more production is being done ITB. For the money you might spend on the UAD system you will get 20 fantastic bits of analog sounding gear. That would cost a fortune otherwise. And you can use the same plugins many times over. Wouldn't it be nice to have 5 Neve compressors!

I can show you a review where they compared the UAD Manley Passive plugin to the real thing. They switched it like 20 times in front of 6 or so famous engineers. No one could tell and one guy got it maybe and only ocassionally ! Is that a worry or what? It's so close now it's not worth the hassle and expense. You don't need to be using analog gear to make honest and good music. That comes from the compositon and performance not the outboard gear you are using.

The great thing about all this is that you can switch off the analog stuff whenever you want in the digital world and just experience that beautiful transparent sound that no analog gear can produce! As Danny says you don't always need it and I agree with him on that. Also you will save a heap of power (and heat on a hot day) in the process and with electricity prices going the way they are I think that is great thing. Our power costs are going UP here in Australia.

The problem is that people are putting high quality analog at the top of the tree but who says it is. Why not switch your paradigm and make high quality digital the top of the tree instead. Then analog will sit somwhere else in relation to that. I have found the more I work with high quality transparent digital sound the more you realise how distorted and inferior in some ways analog actually is. Transformers, valves, passive components all distort the sound in some way, don't forget that.

I used to own some very quailty analog mxers and have mixed albums on them but now I am not using them at all and I can hear the sound of those mixers all over those productions. I am getting a better sound now in the digital world for sure. I do realise that a very expensive SSL or Neve desk is going to sound lovely for sure but it will be the cost of a house to do it. You don't have to spend anywhere near that digitally to get very close these days. Isn't it interesting to see how analog now needs to be ultra expensive and virtually unaffordable in order to match a much cheaper digital alternative.

Well said Jeff...totally agree. At the end of the day...I look at it like this. I've gotten great results out of analog and digital. It really depends who's pushing the buttons with all this stuff. I can sit here and brag about the UAD stuff until I'm blue in the face...that doesn't mean it will work for, or be better than analog for those that are die-hard analog guys.
 
Quite a few of the students I teach here in the recording field are here due to the switch from analog to digital. One of the hardest things to get into their brains is that they think digital is so much more harsh sounding when it isn't. They seem to forget that it's analog coloring the sound and saturating it. In a world of non-destructive audio, it's almost crazy to over-commit something to disc in my opinion unless you're really well seasoned and controlled enough to destructively print the track. Seriously...anyone that's an analog guy, knows there have been times we've printed things we shouldn't have that forced us to reprint. It's too easy to use a little too much coloration on a mic pre or a tube compressor etc. We can safely say that there are as many ruined analog mixes as there are digital plug mixes. It really depends who's behind the wheel and as Middleman said, genre is definitely important.
 
I also think the choice of plugs as well as knowledge of those plugs is super important. At the end of the day, there is no right or wrong other than what works for a person. I think we as engineers really shouldn't have a bias over one or another because lets face it, they both work really well if you know what you're doing. The key thing to my whole argument is, I sincerely do not believe the differences are THAT great enough to spend the extra money on the analog stuff. Can we not eq and color things nearly exact once we are ITB non-destructively? I think we can...and I HAVE many times. Can we simulate clipped circuitry? Eh...kinda. They don't have that quite right in my opinion, but I'd ask those who are hell bent on analog soft clipping to try the Studer 800 tape sim plug from UAD. To me it's the closest to what I hear when I drive my 16 track 1 inch or my 24 track 2 inch. I'm talking so close, it's crazy. AND, you have full bias control to set up how you want the clipping to sound. That's pretty remarkable if you think about it.
 
The Fatso Jr/Sr series comps along with a Studer can give you that soft clipped warm sound. You don't even have to use the Fatso to compress...you can literally simulate the warmth and drive of the unit without it. The warmth and soft clipping is there, you just have to know what to use, how to use it and when to use it. Again, I'm not saying any of this stuff is exact, but if you have never truly tried to spot the differences with some hard research and comparing, you'll never know what options you have. Like Jeff mentioned about the Manley...there are other UAD plugs that were tested with some pro ears that also passed. Ok, we can call it marketing hype if we want because lets face it, they ARE trying to sell a product. But it's something that some of you die hard analog guys should really try at some point.
 
If any of you have the gear to do it...try a test. Record you analog stuff the way you always do for a 30 or a minute worth of a project, then do the entire project over again ITB. Try to see how hard it is for you to cop what you did analog on each instrument. With the right plugs, I bet all of you would be successful and probably some wouldn't even admit it to me that you achieved results better than you thought you would. Yes, you will notice a difference...but will that difference be something that makes you go "wow, what a difference this is just a must have?!" If so...you didn't experiment hard enough and you don't have the right plugs in my opinion. :) But...to each his/her own. Whatever works and makes you enjoy your work and your sounds is what you should use. If it comes by way of a 30k analog rig, God bless you...if it works, stick with it. :)
 
-Danny

droddey


But I don't think that's the really the issue. I think it's more about actually hearing what you are recording. Good players can mix themselves, if they are hearing what it's really going to sound like. They won't if they are just recording stuff that's going to be banged on later with plugins.

Obviously we are talking about two different things between the professional studio and the self recorder at home. The professional studio has to be prepared for crap players if they are cutting the check. The home recorder can do it the old fashioned way, which isn't about what sounds better after the fact, but about making decisions up front and listening to what you are playing and how it blends, and controlling that yourself, instead of spending a day doing EQ automation to achieve the same thing. And, as I described above, it doesn't require $30K of hardware, because you are only using the hardware on the part you are recording at the moment.

Not that it's wrong to do it any other way, I'm just saying that it's a very different mindset and that I think it will create better *music* in the long term, though obviously it'll mean a longer spin up time because it requires more self control and experience than just recording stuff and using a lot of plugins after the fact.
The very fact that someone would ask if actual real hardware is still viable shows how badly things have become skewed in the direction of digital, and the mindset that comes from that, IMO, is way too often not about making music, it's about data processing and polishing you know whats. And the same arguments apply to guitar amp simulators as well, or even learning how to play an instrument to begin with, or sing in key. Why bother these days, right?
 
Again, not the same for pro studios. But for the home recorder, are you looking to be a musician, or are you just interesting in throwing yet another song into the vast ocean of home made songs where it'll be ignored? If you just want to put out songs, then obviously you can do it however you want. But I personally want to be a musician and have the engineering skills to record what I play as it should sound and use my ears while I'm playing. I put out there what I can really actually achieve, which makes me want to improve, instead of just fixing up everything I do to make it sound like I'm ten times better than I am, which is what most of what you hear today actually is. And that's all very much part of the digital mindset. Everything is so fixable in the mix that there's no real need to do anything but a mix. What you throw into it isn't even all that imporant.

Totally agree with you...but you have to look at the engineer as well. Using myself as an example, I'm going to go for the best sound I can before I press the record button. I'm going to exhaust every possibility with different mics and placements to get a good sound while keeping in mind what is best for the song, not the instrument as an entity. And I'll do this if I'm in my 12x12 jam room or my full blown studio. I may or may not eq that sound using anything at the moment. 
 
I try my best not to because my rule of thumb has always been to capture the sound I feel best works for the tune without destructively killing it just yet or don't press record. "Hmm I like this sound, but should I drive it a little with my Drawmer at this stage of the game?" Maybe I will...most times I won't. But the key is to have the sounds stand up for the song and to me, it doesn't matter if you use analog or digital really. It's all about capturing the source first...then you can doctor it up if you want to. But there is something in a sound that makes me go "yeah that's it" before I print it. It normally doesn't need anything done to it at this point when that happens.
 
Others like to color things and make them sound incredible before they actually work with them in the song. Sometimes "incredible" is not the answer for that instrument in THAT song. Ever come up with a great sound that gives you wood only to have to completely change it to work in a mix and sometimes it may not work at all forcing you to reprint? This is a major problem I see all the time. Solo that baby up, it sounds like a million bucks...work with it in the context of the mix, you wonder what's wrong. The engineer needs the right judgement, right? This judgement in my opinion needs to be focused before he presses record as well as how much analog processing he chooses to use because you're stuck with it or you reprint if it doesn't work IF you can. Reprinting isn't always an option in a client environment.
 
Keep in mind, I'm not talking about well known engineers here that have a knack for knowing what's right from wrong. I'm talking about guys that are sometimes just set in their ways with doing something to where they try to print a sound as an entity instead of thinking about how it may work in a full mix. You wouldn't believe some of the mixes I get with over-processed analog gear.
 
When I point out certain things to an engineer...7 times out of 10, they didn't even realize this stuff. Rooms, monitors and knowledge is all important as you know. So if you're pushing analog gear hard and your room and monitors aren't quite right...now you have a different animal to deal with if you've over processed and ruined a track. I dunno man...I just think it's a lot less aggravation going non-destructive with less coloration and in my opinion, analog warmth and sizzle is not a sound I like. But that's just me. I find most analog processors rather dull sounding and kinda 70's. That's all well and good, but it's just not a sound I like for 2011. I can come close to that sound without spending a fortune and the over-all outcome isn't something that makes me jump for joy. Is it good? Yeah...is it better? No, it's "different".
 
Did ya happen to hear the latest Foo Fighters album? In my opinion...and I hate to slag other artists...it's terrible. A few cool moments...but Dave was all for this analog recording which in my opinion, he tried to make sound digital!! This is where analog fails in my opinion. There are certain boundaries that people try to push that just don't sound good to *me*. Dave is so happy about that album....God Bless him...but I'm not the only one that has commented about how bad it sounds.
 
Another thing I find with die-hard analog guys is...most of them are just so biased, they don't even want to give digital stuff a REAL chance. A guy like Middleman for example...at least he can say "yeah, I tried digital stuff...it wasn't for me". So I can respect that. But there are others that just won't even give it a shot with the right stuff. I mean seriously...buy one great plug that sounds cool, you can use it multiple times....buy one rack, you need more for 5x the price. And we honestly have to weigh how much different that quality is. I got a buddy who loves his Fairchild. I've always felt that he's over-used it in his mixes. He likes a little bit of dirt....to me, it was too much. He tried the UAD version and actually liked it better because it didn't have the same kind of dirt. If we try to compare analog to digital...you gotta have the right plugs to compare or you'll never know. 
 
That's why I said...create an all analog mix, then do it again all digital and see how close you come to it just for the experiment part of it. Anyone that knows what they're doing is going to come close. And, at that point you have to ask yourself "how close did I come and is it worth it for me to buy all this pricey gear?" That's where I am with it. I'm not trying to bash analog stuff, I just sincerely feel we can come close enough without justifying the extra expense...that's all.
 
-Danny 

But my argument, again, isn't about whether one can sound as good as another, but that the gear should be part of the recording process. That the artist should hear what he's laying down and react to that, not something that's a long way away from what it's going to ultimately sound like.

But, for the record, I don't like clean. I think modern music focuses vastly too much on processing instead of playing, and on style over substance. I think that what we should concentrate on is what makes for a great performance, and modern, clean sounding techniques, IMO, aren't that. I think that the modern 'sound' is basically just a reaction to the sudden introduction of a lot of computer based digital technology which in not too long will sound as dated as massive gated reverb synth pop stuff (which was also a reaction to the sudden availability of some new technology.)

Soul and vibe isn't clean, it's gritty, it's emotional, it has mistakes, it has stuff that's too loud, stuff that's not always completely in tune. I think that there's a reason that those 70s records are still among the most popular music of all time, because the limited tools and the requirements to (much more so) play it like it was supposed to sound, made for better performances and better music. And ultimately that's what it's about. If you can do that make it sound really nice, that's great, but I don't think that the modern style does that very often. Data processing isn't very vibey.
 
It's one thing to argue whether you could record something and then apply after the fact either digital or analog processing and get similar results (and of course the analog processing is at a disadvantage since it's alrready been digitized at that point anyway and has to go through another back and back in round.) But it's another to argue that good musicians wouldn't produce a better performance and more emotion if they were hearing what they were really recording and could react to that and 'play the gear.' I think that almost every single top engineer from the past who produced the classics that we all know, that I've heard in interviews, have made a point that having the balls to make decisions up front and commit to things was a big part of how they worked. Yeh, they would use what technology they had in plenty of cases, but that technology was limited and it kept them honest. I don't see much honesty in today's music, because so much of it isn't what was actually recorded.
 
And also, it's great you take the time to find the right sound before hitting record, but I think that's not nearly so common today. As I pointed out in another thread recently, The Smashing Pumpkins worked for almost a year on Mellon Collie, most days and lots of long days. They took the time to find what works. Today the advent of so many tools to just fix things after the fact, and the ability to to infinite automation of every variable, I think, has made people think that that's no longer important. Cut-n-past, tune, stretch, sample replace, etc...
 
And, just for the record, I'm not one of those "nothing made after '79 is any good" types. I was pretty much on board all the way up to the end of the 90s, and probably half my collection is from that period. And it was then that the current thing started, and all this new technology finally reached a critical mass and price point. And everyone who had a laptop started calling himself a producer and all that.
 

Yeh, as I said, if you are running a pro studio, it's a completely different thing. You are being paid and if the person who is paying you can't play or sing, you are still expected to produce an acceptable result and you do what you have to do to make the customer happy, and time is money so you do it with the tools that get it done the fastest. I absolutely understand that scenario. I'm definitely talking about the self recorder here, who does have the luxury of doing it the right way.

I'm sitting here barely able to type because I just spent some hours tracking acoustic guitar parts for a new tune. My finger tips hurt so bad I may be crying a little bit while I write this. I could have stopped a few different times, just cut and pasted and said that's good enough. But it's a matter of integrity, IMO. If I can't actually play the part, then I don't deserve to put it out as though I did.

And it's not flawless, as the modern style dictates, it's real. I didn't copy and paste over the small mistakes, since that's what makes for a human performance. The whole modern aesthetic seems to be too much about, as someone else said, working so hard to get rid of every single thing that's wrong, that you end up losing what's right. I think that's often true today, where people worry more about it being perfect than being great.

Outboard gear will always be needed (or perhaps more accurately, 'lusted after/desired?') but as others have said, we can get so close nowadays with plugins that, for me at least, it just isn't worth it when you're working for money. Sure, hardware feels great, it looks great, and there's something cool and nostalgic about using it, but man, what a load of hassle and a huge expense (both in the initial purchase price, and the maintenance bills). I recently was recording a guy who was adamant on getting "that warm, smooth analogue sound" so I thought I'd use some of my tube compressors on it. It took so much longer to mix this way, and at the end of it I thought, "you know what? I could have gotten something almost identical to this sound in about 5min with my plugins!"

And as has been said, people tend to overuse outboard gear - hell, if I'd paid $40k for a compressor, you can be sure that I'd be using it everywhere too! Everything has it's place, and it's far more about the dude behind the desk/computer than the gear, which involves knowing which tools to use and when. And let's not forget the players too - it never ceases to amaze me that when I get good players in here, I stick up some mics, and BANG - it sounds fantastic! It's like you'd have to try really hard to screw up a great player's record!

As for having a great front end for tracking - sure, it's nice, but it's not a necessity. If I had a date booked and my Avalon pres, Aurora converters and Neumann mics weren't working, would I cancel the date? Nope. I'd pull out my trusty Cakewalk UA-25 and Rode mics, and, in good conscience, continue the day's recording. Have a look here http://forum.cakewalk.com/fb.ashx?m=2349230

But anyway, as has been answered here already - yep, outboard gear will always be here. I've chosen to almost never use mine though.

jamescollins

As for having a great front end for tracking - sure, it's nice, but it's not a necessity. If I had a date booked and my Avalon pres, Aurora converters and Neumann mics weren't working, would I cancel the date? Nope. I'd pull out my trusty Cakewalk UA-25 and Rode mics

OK, since your talking 'professional' studio then... Seriously, if a professional musician - songwriter had agreed to book a studio based on the knowledge that he/she would be using hardware such as; 

. Aurora I/O 
. Avalon Pre
. U87

and on that date showed up to find the studio 'only' has the Cakewalk UA-25 and Rode NT1A mic available? 

* Ahem * you may not be the one cancelling the date ;) 


Another consideration 
With over 30 years experience I can safely say; all singers I've tracked in the studio 'want to monitor with effects' and of course nowadays professionals expect near zero latency (there's no excuse to not cater to all of this), with that principle in mind it's good to cater to 'their' needs since of course they're the paying customer and since the reverb is not going to print then what the hey they can have as much reverb as they want :) 

Yes of course... no doubt plugins have come along way since 1991 (see my post)

Sure equipment failure can happen so either immediately arrange for a replacement setup of equal or better, or reschedule the booking. 

Like I previously said; 
At the very least, any serious home studio owner would benefit greatly by having a top-notch audio interface, it's the very heart of a solid DAW particularly the ones with solid drivers, mic pres and effects, some have options for inserts ;) 

Yes, I know.

Avalon does an incredible job with the metal work and over all assembly quality.

And I admire their commitment to power supply design.


:-)



all the best,
mike