TechMoan: Consumer reel to reel

[kevm14]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHSz9Gi-II

I freaking love this guy. He's so thorough.

There is no doubt at all that this was a quality format, and most definitely better than anything until the compact disc, in terms of consumer audio. Expensive, though.

Listen with good speakers or headphones and you will be blown away by his sample playback of a stereo demo reel dating back to 1957. The quality and dynamic range is mind blowing. I'm also impressed at the quality of the recording equipment. This reminds me of that other video about tapes that I posted a while back from him. It does go to show that the best of analog audio (high speed magnetic tape, 30 IPS being studio master quality and 15 and 7-1/2 being still very good) was not just very high quality, but was high quality like 60 years ago. That really is something. Unlike other formats, it got worse over time as they tried to compete on price by adding tracks and slowing down tape speed.

I haven't read that Verge article he referenced, but I'd have to agree - this is the new vinyl in terms of a retro audio format. Unlike vinyl, reel to reel is capable of outstanding audio quality. I have no doubt that 30 and maybe even 15 IPS 1/4" reel to reel tape exceeds the quality of a CD. I think you'd need a high res digital format like 192khz and 24-bit audio to really store the full dynamic range and quality that the tape holds. The CD, of course, was a damn good consumer solution being compact, durable and cheap to reproduce so it doesn't need to make any apologies. Especially when you consider that many people are listening to worse quality via streaming music. I am guilty (Pandora).

[kevm14]

21:12 That is just about the highest quality sounding sound I have heard come out of a youtube video.

Yes!!!!

The lesson, though, is that mastering and mixing is extremely important. Because even through Youtube (which is probably quite decent but still compressed obviously), you can very clearly hear the quality and dynamic range.

[kevm14]

Prize for funniest comment:

"The machine only plays One Direction" was a scary way for me to mishear.

Hahahahaha

[kevm14]

This is the point I was trying to make.

Ah, the truth emerges. We are living in an age where our technology is capable of leaps and bounds better sound quality than we are afforded. After all, if you want to make your music compatible with someone listening on a 1980 FM radio alarm clock, you can't target a 12dB crest factor and 20-20kHz frequency response.

Even the much-maligned MP3 is capable of quite good quality (with a good encoder, and reasonable bitrate.) But... garbage in, garbage out. Listening to modern recordings is a sad experience when you become completely aware of this.

Yup.

[kevm14]

Great point. It can only be as good as the master, or worse.

where does the 'magic' happen. If it's not there in the master, putting it on tape won't make anything appear. If the specific distortion inherent in tape mastering/duplication/playback chain is wanted, then apply the equivalent distortion. A top end remastering creates the 'magic', not the media used for storage.

So the goal of the media storage/distribution format should be to maintain as much of the original quality as possible. So, we don't need to switch to analog reel to reel - our MP3 formats are capable of more than we're getting a lot of the time. Still, it is very cool from a retro standpoint, given how damn old it is and still amazing sounding.

[kevm14]

Making the point in a slightly different way:

Nyquist does indeed take care of sample rate, although the theory is based on perfectly recording the amplitude in every sample. The bit depth of your sampling does matter. You'll benefit more from going to 24 bits over 16 bits than going to 192khz over 44khz (unless you leave nyquist and go to a completely different sampling method, such as bitstream, which is based on different theory and hard to directly compare). Having said that, I think that a well recorded CD sounds great, and that most of the problems we have now are due to the way things are recorded, mixed and mastered, not it's 16 bit bit-depth. The loudness wars have done a great deal of damage!

Again, we need to ensure the best recording, mixing and mastering. That's where you will get the best bang for the buck. The high bit rate and bit depth formats are great, but worthless if the mix/master sucks.

[kevm14]

This reminds me of JPEGs. Back in the day, digital cameras didn't make the best quality JPEGs. So people shot in a raw format and converted to JPEG using fancy software like Photoshop, Lightroom or whatever. Where they went wrong is when some people said "JPEG sucks, it only has 8 bits per color channel!" and used the crappy JPEGs from their cameras as proof. Well guess what - when the on-board processing improved what happened? Much better out of camera JPEGs. The format didn't change. It even turns out that if the camera makes good enough JPEGs, you can push/pull them some amount which would have been absolutely impossible 10 years ago. People get too obsessed with the storage/distribution format I think and this has happened kind of throughout modern history.

I mean I'm obsessed with tape but that's only because I really didn't realize that there was such high quality audio available to the consumer (albeit the wealthy consumer) as early as 1957. Just crazy.

[kevm14]

This dude is laying the smack down. Preach!

This is getting really, really old... At the end of the day, the whole digital vs. analog is completely buried by all the other problems down in the production chain.
FACTS:
- Analog things (tape, records, etc.) WILL wear out and lose quality. Digital copies will preserve the original quality IF they are exact copies.
- Tape has some artifacts that DEGRADE the signal that was originally fed into the recorder. However, much like film grain, a lot of people (myself included) find these artifacts pleasant to the ear in front of the more "aseptic" digital recordings. But the truth is that you are introducing a distortion in the signal, so it no longer is an exact copy of the original.
- Higher sampling rates and bit depths are important while manipulating the sound (in the studio). But having things recorded that you can't hear is pretty much pointless. You can't hear them. Period. Even the amplifier/speaker/headphone you are using can't reproduce them, because it is not designed to do so. And in an analog device, you don't have sampling, but you have BANDWIDTH. Even a professional master recorder running at 30 ips can't record sounds above 30 KHz, so a digital 192 KHz digitizer would beat it by a large amount in that respect.
- Then you have dynamic range. Even the best master recorders (Studer A-800 and the like) could barely reach 70 dB of signal to noise ratio, which is less than a CD (about 90 dB) and much less than current pro digitizers that easily exceed a 110 dB ratio. Which can be pointless too, because they can even exceed the noise level of microphones and mixing desks.

That's not to say that everything digital is good, of course not. Compressed audio is of course degraded, and the artifacts can be much more evident and unpleasant than analog artifacts. Poorly designed devices will sound as horrible as your average 80's boombox. But that's not a problem of being digital or analog, is a problem of design and manufacturing quality.
And of course, there is the human factor. A good engineer will do marvels with analog equipment (looking at Alan Parsons and Pink Floyd here), a bad engineer will do just crap with the most expensive studio in the world if he has no idea of what he is doing. BTW, if you ask older engineers, even the more nostalgic ones are quite happy to turn the page and get rid of the troubles related to analog equipment, much like old photographers are quite happy of working with digital photography and doing in minutes what took hours to do in a traditional photo lab.

Just my two cents as a sound engineer myself.

[kevm14]

For my last point this evening, I will bring up some good discussion from the youtube comments. Everything is quantized. Don't believe me? Light goes per photon. Electricity goes per electron. Digital goes per sample. Analog, too, is quantized. Some people are arguing that analog is better than digital because, unlike digital, analog can store the "true" continuous, infinite bandwidth audio signal. Problem is, that is utter horseshit. If analog really stored an infinite bandwidth audio signal, then tape speed would not matter. But it matters a LOT. Slower tape speeds = lower quality. It's quantized, just in a different way than the digital is. But it is not infinite and is not magically storing the "true" signal.