Analogue

Analogue means analogous#

Most people think analogue means the real sound, smooth and continuous, while digital is some numeric computer version with a horrible jagged stair-step. If you agree with that definition, you're wrong. The word comes from the Greek analogos: something comparable to something else. Lord Kelvin's tide-predicting machine of 1872 was an analogue model of tides made of pulleys and gears. The Phillips machine modelled whole economies with water.

Now look at a recording chain. Sound waves hit a microphone and become a voltage, the voltage gets stored somehow, comes back as a voltage, gets amplified and goes to speakers. That is true for tape and it is true for digital. Everything before and after the storage in the middle is identical. The only difference is how you choose to store it.

Nothing physical is perfectly continuous#

"But digital is discrete and analogue is continuous." Sooner or later you bump into molecules and atoms. According to one manufacturer of analogue tape, quarter-inch at 15 ips holds 65 million magnetic particles per second, so something like 30 million per channel, and cassette only around 4 million. DSD 1024 runs at about 45 million samples per second, more than quarter-inch tape. So pick a threshold. Either cassette is digital, or DSD is analogue, or quarter-inch isn't. The definition breaks down the moment you put numbers on it.

And digital isn't stair-stepped anyway; see sample rate.

Good digital is transparent, and that is why studios adopted it#

High-quality digital recording has no sound of its own. That is the point of it, and that is why it caught on from the late 70s. In a good studio, flick between the live microphone feed and the return from a 24/96 recorder at a low buffer and you essentially can't hear the switch, unless something is noisy or broken. Conversion, clocking, preamps, cables, amplification and digital recording are all solved problems.

In my video on analogue elitism I play a clip of Chris Lord Alge explaining that most of his career was on a Sony 3348 digital multitrack, 48 tracks at 48 kHz and 16-bit, for thousands of songs, and that the machine was a major part of his sound. Even most "all-analogue" records cut since the 80s went through a digital delay in the cutting rack (see vinyl).

Digital wins on transparency but that is not the only goal#

Modern high-quality digital beats the old analogue formats on frequency response, dynamic range and distortion. If transparency is your goal, digital is better. Does that make it better at everything? No. Buying a record from the band at a small show, the big artwork, collecting the thing: I love all of that. The experience has real value. The idea that touching a converter contaminates the music is the marketing hype element which should be separated out here.

A box can't be pristine and full of character#

Read the copy for an expensive analogue summing mixer. Legendary warmth, analogue mojo, transformer glue, and in the same paragraph, pristine sonic excellence and remarkable purity. Stop and think about what those words mean. Tone is deviation from an accurate representation of the input. Technical quality means the opposite: what comes in one side comes out the other side identical, only louder, in the case of an amplifier. That is what it has meant for the whole history of audio electronics. So which is it? It can't be both.

Vintage colour was never intentional#

The old companies were trying to build the cleanest, highest-quality gear their technology allowed, and back then expensive gear really was technically superior. The colour people now call legendary tone is the physical limit of the components of the day. Nobody wanted their gear to sound broken.

Pultecs, Fairchilds and plate reverbs were popular in the 50s and 60s because there was nothing else. Go back in a time machine and offer a studio owner a laptop with a DAW, its stock plugins and a 24-channel interface, and he would happily trade his whole studio for it. More under vintage gear.

What expensive analogue sells now is nostalgia#

DAWs sum just fine. Most of the expensive hardware does what you can do in your DAW with a cheap plugin, so the makers are no longer selling technical superiority. They're selling nostalgia. And when they say warmth, mojo, vintage and analogue glue, do you know what those words mean in electrical engineering terms? They mean distortion. That's it.

Does distortion sound bad in a mix? Maybe not. It can sound great. You just don't need $8,000 of hardware for it when you can get that tone in a plugin like Tractatus. If your mix sounds weak, cold and narrow, it's probably not because you don't own an analogue summing mixer. It's probably a skill issue.

That doesn't mean I think everything is snake oil. Microphones, speakers, headphones and rooms are not entirely solved problems. For plugins that claim to model old metal boxes, see analogue modelling.