FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Monday, September 04, 2006
Dylan hits out at Digital Recording
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the legendary singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan, had this to say :
I find it interesting to read Dylan's opinion about the state of recording these days because I know quite a few people who would agree whole heartedly with his point of view that digital recreations of sound simply don't cut the mustard; that they lose some special element that is detectable in analogue recordings, and especially those played on traditional record players.
To some degree I see the logic : by definition, a digital platform will always break a continuous sound down into it's component parts, splicing it into many thousands of pieces to be reconstructed at the other end, and so there is lots of room for degradation of the original sound environment. The successfulness and usefulness of the final product, though, is entirely dependent on the recording, processing and reproduction methods, and the sample rate (the number of sample slices of the original signal that are taken per second) at which the sounds were originally inputted and at which they are eventually outputted. And I agree that since the invent of mp3's digitally recorded products have suffered - this particular format compresses any sound file by enforcing a pretty dismal sample rate and using other techniques such as repetition of slices that are considered 'the same' by some criteria or other. It is this reason, I believe, that ultimately music lovers will turn their back on downloadable media in favour of higher quality recordings such as is available on compact disc (CD) where much higher sample rates are possible.
But, as Bob Dylan's interview with Rolling Stone highlights, many vinyl enthusiasts still claim that even listening to CD's cannot compete with the experience of hearing music played on original old record players, now practically extinct due to the cumbersome, inconvenient and fragile nature of the hardware involved (records are very vulnerable to accidental warping or scratching, resulting in clicks and hiss on the output signal, and unless the record player is very well protected, the stylus needle has a tendency to jump with any surrounding vibrations, including those caused by the output of loudspeakers themselves). Actually, a few months ago myself and a friend decided to test this theory, comparing two recordings of The Beatle's Rubber Soul album, one original vinyl bought in the late 60's and a copy of an original CD. The results were immediately noticeable - indeed, the vinyl record did output a warmer tone, somehow as if the edges of the recording had been carefully rubbed with sand paper. But, I felt that some of the detail was lost as a result, allowing the 'harsher' sounding CD recording to stand out in terms of the range of audible sound events it offered the listener. Yes, the CD signal is made up of thousands of 'slices' of the original sound experience but this alone did not impede the listener from distinguishing the most delicate nuances of the songs in question, particularly in the higher frequency range.
Of course, one of the main reasons digital is now used as a practical alternative to analogue recording is because the resulting files are much easier to handle, share and manipulate. The job of editing a track that would once perhaps have taken the studio worker an hour, while he literally cut up bits of audio tape and stick them back together, can now be done in a matter of seconds with a few clicks of the mouse. Manipulation of the signal is then also much easier to achieve, especially since the rise of powerful computer technology, allowing a skilled engineer to do the most amazing things with a soundscape in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken, and with a lot less in the way of consumable wastage. Personally, I believe that if one weighs up all these advantages against the slight loss of tone (subtle enough that it is barely possible to accurately describe without falling back on metaphor, let alone technically identify) it is clear that digital recording has a long future ahead of it yet, although perhaps turning back toward high quality recording and playback methods. Failing this, there's always the live performance to consider!
We all like records that are played on record players, but let's face it, those
days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all
kinds of ways, but I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent
in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're
atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no
vocal, no nothing, just like -- static. Even these songs probably sounded ten
times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no
stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like,
'Everybody's gettin' music for free.' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't worth
nothing anyway.'
I find it interesting to read Dylan's opinion about the state of recording these days because I know quite a few people who would agree whole heartedly with his point of view that digital recreations of sound simply don't cut the mustard; that they lose some special element that is detectable in analogue recordings, and especially those played on traditional record players.
To some degree I see the logic : by definition, a digital platform will always break a continuous sound down into it's component parts, splicing it into many thousands of pieces to be reconstructed at the other end, and so there is lots of room for degradation of the original sound environment. The successfulness and usefulness of the final product, though, is entirely dependent on the recording, processing and reproduction methods, and the sample rate (the number of sample slices of the original signal that are taken per second) at which the sounds were originally inputted and at which they are eventually outputted. And I agree that since the invent of mp3's digitally recorded products have suffered - this particular format compresses any sound file by enforcing a pretty dismal sample rate and using other techniques such as repetition of slices that are considered 'the same' by some criteria or other. It is this reason, I believe, that ultimately music lovers will turn their back on downloadable media in favour of higher quality recordings such as is available on compact disc (CD) where much higher sample rates are possible.
But, as Bob Dylan's interview with Rolling Stone highlights, many vinyl enthusiasts still claim that even listening to CD's cannot compete with the experience of hearing music played on original old record players, now practically extinct due to the cumbersome, inconvenient and fragile nature of the hardware involved (records are very vulnerable to accidental warping or scratching, resulting in clicks and hiss on the output signal, and unless the record player is very well protected, the stylus needle has a tendency to jump with any surrounding vibrations, including those caused by the output of loudspeakers themselves). Actually, a few months ago myself and a friend decided to test this theory, comparing two recordings of The Beatle's Rubber Soul album, one original vinyl bought in the late 60's and a copy of an original CD. The results were immediately noticeable - indeed, the vinyl record did output a warmer tone, somehow as if the edges of the recording had been carefully rubbed with sand paper. But, I felt that some of the detail was lost as a result, allowing the 'harsher' sounding CD recording to stand out in terms of the range of audible sound events it offered the listener. Yes, the CD signal is made up of thousands of 'slices' of the original sound experience but this alone did not impede the listener from distinguishing the most delicate nuances of the songs in question, particularly in the higher frequency range.
Of course, one of the main reasons digital is now used as a practical alternative to analogue recording is because the resulting files are much easier to handle, share and manipulate. The job of editing a track that would once perhaps have taken the studio worker an hour, while he literally cut up bits of audio tape and stick them back together, can now be done in a matter of seconds with a few clicks of the mouse. Manipulation of the signal is then also much easier to achieve, especially since the rise of powerful computer technology, allowing a skilled engineer to do the most amazing things with a soundscape in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken, and with a lot less in the way of consumable wastage. Personally, I believe that if one weighs up all these advantages against the slight loss of tone (subtle enough that it is barely possible to accurately describe without falling back on metaphor, let alone technically identify) it is clear that digital recording has a long future ahead of it yet, although perhaps turning back toward high quality recording and playback methods. Failing this, there's always the live performance to consider!
