It's still sort of amazing, to me, to think that the engineers can sync up 48kHz sound with +/-30Hz pictures and make it all work.

mike_mccue


It's still sort of amazing, to me, to think that the engineers can sync up 48kHz sound with +/-30Hz pictures and make it all work.

A freind of mines father built some Heath Robinson style contraption for painting the magnetic stripe alongside super 8 or 16 mm cine film.  We used to take turns operating it when we felt masochistic enough to earn a bit of beer money when we were young.
 
Dern thing always used to break down on my shift and I rarely got paid being as it was piece work.  The guy who owned it made some good money out of it for a good while during the late 60's early 70's contracting out to duplicating houses.
 
Ingenuity will always create the means regardless of the technology available.
 
I saw a quote from someone the other day that said "We used to have computers in our studios, now we have studios in our computers".

An other random thing to consider;

Oscilloscopes don't really show you a continuous wave.

It just looks like they do.

An analog, CRT tube, oscilloscope is really displaying a series of pulses or samples.

The inability of the Phosphor to go dark immediately and our mental capacity for persistence of vision allows our minds to construct a continuous line/vector/curve form in our minds.

I don't know how that applies to the discussion... but I thought some might find it curious. I think it is easy to assume that a scope shows the actual waveform, but it's really just showing an analogy of it.


best regards,
mike

I wish there was a convenient coffee shop where we could meet up and draw on napkins and stuff.

:-)

Good times.

Middleman


Great link and thread here. I always use dither Pow r-2 because I read something a long time ago that said it was the best compromise. I don't know if that is even the case, or if it's really improving things but I do it at the end in the master process. I also agree with others above (and Ethan) that the beauty of digital recording is its clarity. It's a foundation from which one can deviate into coloration and distortion as needed. However, in the same train of thought, it’s more work if you try to accomplish these characteristics after the fact. This is why I have moved more to analog gear and away from plug-ins for certain sounds. Faster results if you just use the sonics you know, trust, and build them right into the tracking process.

More controversial is getting things to sound like they ran through a tube. I just haven't heard the plug-in that truly duplicates something like an LA2A or a V76. The sound is a combination of transient response in various regions of the frequency spectrum and distortion. Rich in the low end that can be partially addressed with EQ but it never sounds the same. Getting off track from Dither so will end this.

Dither does improve things, that is clearly shown, I find you can hear the effects of not dithering when a signal decays into the noise floor you can hear it step down as it gets nearer.  You might have to amplify your signal enough to be able to hear it but it sure happens, when you dither providing you can't hear the noise floor anyway then you should hear any stepping as the signal decays.  Using shaped dither just pushes the bulk of the noise floor into the higher frequency ranges where it is less prone to being heard.  It just needs to be done once and only once as the last thing you do at the point of reducing bit depth down to a 16 bit delivery format.
 
I agree also that if you want something to sound like it's going through a tube circuit then undoubtedly the best way to do that is just to use a tube circuit.
 
I think the pre-occupation with getting DSP to emulate analogue gear has been a waste of time that has held back the progress in producing real innovation in the digital realm.  I do notice that trend starting to change now but I think it's because people have finally got sick of yet another emulation of a familiar looking bit of old iron rather than people pro-actively looking for truly breakthrough digital processing methods.
 
Either way the future is looking more exciting as a result.