As a Producer and Recording Engineer,I have been seeing many artists who want a tube and somewhat lo-fi sound. The standard in the recording Industry.

Well...it is simple they record on tape for a more natural sound.warmer and then remix or mix on to digital sound. I know people who are going back to a 4 track or 8 track tape form. The warmth and feel of say a ribbon mic is different then a high priced condencer mic. Many artist are now doing all thier work on the older tape format or recording total digital and then mastering on a tape lower FI system. So it's a great day to be a home recordest. For God's sake man don't dis the tape options and the pro's are using it so rock on home studio artist. And don't give up. We're going forward and backwards at the same time.

Great topic to bring up. Thanks!

Yes, we go forward and backwards at the same time. Really, I think that it amounts to expanded choices and a democratization of technology (as long as certain industrial groups and private individual do not take control and make the technology illegal for those not in their club). The era of digital music has made it possible for people with modest means to construct a home studio and record good (even excellent) quality music. It also creates the ability to have a geographically disperse community like Dmusic to share the art thus created and further spur on creativity. It also makes the cost of reproducing it almost trivial once a modest investment in hardware has been made. So I am a big fan of the digital revolution.

But at the same time, in passing from analog to digital we have gone backwards. We have (at least for my ears) lost quality in the reproduction of the music. The digitization process throws away a lot of information that your nervous system (ears to brain) can capture and react to. No matter how good the digitization is, your analog ears and brain are still running at a higher speed (and finer granularity) and the digital recording still can not capture everything that an analog method can. If we are talking about digitally composed/orchestrated music, the effect is not so important and maybe even nonexistant. However, when it is a matter of an analog instrument, then the difference can be important. An interesting comparison is to take something with a lot of midrange (let's say Stan Getz' version of the Girl From Ipanema w/Astrud Gilberto et al) and listen to it as a digital CD version and an analog vinyl version. The digital will be amazingly clean, no surface noise, no occassional pops, etc. However, it might not be able to give you the shiver up your spine of the sounds and realism captured on the analog version. (Let's not start talking about comparing vinyl/tubes vs CD/chips/solidstate. A tube distorts in a way that is pleasing (musical) to the human ear and solidstate does not always do the same and while that is an equally interesting and controversial topic, it's for another thread.) What happened? The digitization threw away stuff that your brain can detect and react to in an original performance and is more completely captured through a continous medium such as tape or grooves in the vinyl. Your brain can still do a Fourier transform and spectrum analysis of the music faster than machines can do it and that is part of the basis of the difference.

So, what's best? As is often the case, that depends on what you value. CD's are cheap to make and the technology is reasonably affordable. The quality is very good, the deterioration of the support with time is minimal. It's small and portable. Other forms of digital music are even more portable, durable and inexpensive. That is really great stuff and I am trying to benefit from it as much as possible! However when we talk about the quality of representing the music and eliciting responses from the brain, I think that analog is still winning.

High quality analog still rules, but digital is catching up.

I think most of us home recording types would love an analog studio but we usually don't have the money, and it's not just the gear, a new 15 minute roll of 24 track analog tape costs about 250 dollars.

Most recordings suffer more from bad recording technique and bad performance than the type of medium in which they were recorded anyway.

hmmmm... from someone with very little digital v analog studio engineer experience knowledge... id say with a 8/4 track tape recorder... what about messing up when your recording? surely several takes would decrease the sound quality... rewinding and fast forwarding which can be a pain, with digital theres none of that - hmmmmm... there is no right and wrong here really