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Is it possible to transfer analog tone and soundstage of vintage reel to reel to digital.
Sam here again. I have a hi-res digital rip of the rolling stones sticky fingers album from an original commercial reel to reel tape from 1971 and the analog warmth and soundstage is as good as it gets to my ears. loudness war free sound. https://postimg.cc/rDmzvR80
I realize there are many digital plugins that emulate the sound of analog tape and vinyl, however when I use them in post processing of digital audio I seem to get further away from the sound I'm trying to achieve? Now I may be naive on the subject, but if I want to digitally replicate the sound of vintage analog tape in the digital domain, why not go directly to the source? Heres what I did I extracted 1 second of analog tape sound between tracks and made an impulse file for the convolver dsp filter for foobar2000. I believe it made the digital download sound better, however, I'm not 100% sure. Here are my audio samples (1) reel to reel (2) commercial digital download (3) commercial digital download with the impulse filter applied. I used replay gain to normalize the volume to 89db for all three samples.
(1) reel to reel (1971) 24/192 http://u.pc.cd/d2qrtalK
(2) commercial digital download flac16/44 2009 remaster http://u.pc.cd/4oditalK
(3) commercial digital download flac16/44 2009 remaster.impulse applied http://u.pc.cd/99ActalK
I realize there are many digital plugins that emulate the sound of analog tape and vinyl, however when I use them in post processing of digital audio I seem to get further away from the sound I'm trying to achieve? Now I may be naive on the subject, but if I want to digitally replicate the sound of vintage analog tape in the digital domain, why not go directly to the source? Heres what I did I extracted 1 second of analog tape sound between tracks and made an impulse file for the convolver dsp filter for foobar2000. I believe it made the digital download sound better, however, I'm not 100% sure. Here are my audio samples (1) reel to reel (2) commercial digital download (3) commercial digital download with the impulse filter applied. I used replay gain to normalize the volume to 89db for all three samples.
(1) reel to reel (1971) 24/192 http://u.pc.cd/d2qrtalK
(2) commercial digital download flac16/44 2009 remaster http://u.pc.cd/4oditalK
(3) commercial digital download flac16/44 2009 remaster.impulse applied http://u.pc.cd/99ActalK
Showing 15 responses by geoffkait
Of course they’re related, silly goose. They are both tape. That’s what the discussion is about. The differences in sound quality between digital and tape. And whether the analog virtues of tape are transferrable. Try to keep up, roberttdid, roberttcan, Ethan Winer, whoever you are. Except for your numerous personal attacks on me your contribution on to this thread has been (incorrectly) stating that CD mixing practices are responsible for overly aggressive dynamic range compression. |
I’m going to do and end run around Mr. Smarty Pants 👖 roberttdid, roberttcan, atdavid, whoever he is and get back on track for just a second, and say that digitally remastered cassettes - they’ve been around like forever - are an excellent compromise between analog and digital. Very high signal to noise ratio, dynamic range, information retrieval !! and capturing much of the analog sound of the original source. The advantage of portable cassette playback - no angry PMs please - is it avoids all or most the pitfalls of CD playback, e.g., expense, power cords, speaker cables, interconnects, AC power, AC ground anomalies, fuses, transformers, Scattered light issues, fluttering disc issues. Having said that, pure analog tape usually has better high frequency performance and is less hard sounding that “digalog” type cassettes. |
The name of Robert Ludwig’s company is Gateway Mastering, not Gateway Mixing. Stay in school, roberttcan, roberttdid, whatever. http://www.gatewaymastering.com |
roberttdid I think you have your answer already in the last 4 words of your statement. It is all in the mixing, and what you like is the mixing. The format is secondary in this case. Sam here again. I have a hi-res digital rip of the rolling stones sticky fingers album from an original commercial reel to reel tape from 1971 and the analog warmth and soundstage is as good as it gets to my ears. loudness war free sound. >>>>>Unfortunately for your “observation” your point is incorrect as the loudness wars has to do with mastering practices, not mixing. It was a war between level and dynamic range and musicality. I just pointed out yesterday the big advantage of cassettes (and obviously RTR tapes) is their inherent high dynamic range (And concomitant musicality) as they were virtually all produced prior to the start of the Loudness Wars. Except from wiki page on Loudness Wars, “In late 2008, mastering engineer Bob Ludwig offered three versions of the Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy for approval to co-producers Axl Rose and Caram Costanzo. They selected the one with the least compression. Ludwig wrote, "I was floored when I heard they decided to go with my full dynamics version and the loudness-for-loudness-sake versions be damned." Ludwig said the "fan and press backlash against the recent heavily compressed recordings finally set the context for someone to take a stand and return to putting music and dynamics above sheer level."[18]“ |