When did recording studios switch to digital recording from tape?

What does it matter as long as it sounds good?

 

With all its noise products.

 

Or lack thereof. But with nothing added or removed.

 

True.... but the digital drum "replacement" sounds were still recorded to analog tape.

 

That's the problem, by not being mandatory there is little incentive for anyone to make such a disc knowing that many players may not support it. The longer that situation continues, the more players there are that do not support the feature, and you end up in a vicious circle.

 

yeah. I see what you're saying: it's an analog recording. What's funny is that the album sounds very much like a digital recording to me, though it's not possible if you consider that from a purely sound quality standpoint. It sounds too good for early 80s digital.

 

Yup. Made evident by the number of releases which package a BD and an SACD of the program.

 

Some record label like Universal that has released some BD-Audio discs should have taken the chance and in addition of including the usual Hi Res PCM and DTS-HD Master Audio may have also add a DSD track, this way all bases are covered, PCM and DSD lovers. I have The Planets BD-Audio released by Deutsche Grammophone/Universal on BD-Audio and despite having a stereo and a 4.1 track at 192/24 there's still plenty of space on the disc to have included those on DSD also.

 

Ah, but you are applying logic to the situation. That's not the way these big companies work!



[Edit - forgot to mention before, there are no higher than DSD256 native recordings (and they are a rarity), so upconverting to DSD512, etc. is akin to the old PCM days of upsampling everything to 24/192. You may like the result, but you are not able to improve on the base sampling rate.]

 

You're right, I was thinking with logic, record labels only think in terms of $$$.
I have never heard a DSD256 recording but for the sound of DSD64 DSD256 must be more than enough to get all the ultrasonic noise well beyond the audio band and even ultrasonic harmonics. Theoreticly DSD256 could have a flat response if properly noise shaped up to 90/100 Khz with ultrasonic noise starting after that frequencies, I think DSD256 was designed to perform just like 192/24 but on a Delta/Sigma format.

 

The problem is that 1-bit sigma-delta can become jitter limited. The demands on the clock and circuit layout increase significantly as you continue to increase the clock rate. For this and other reasons, most of the sigma-delta based DACs these days are few bit rather than 1-bit. You get nothing for nothing!

 

Here's a very detailed write-up on Decca's early digital recorder: The Decca Digital Audio Recorder

 

I remember reading about Matsushita's M.A.S.H D/A converters used on CD players on the mid to late 1990's, these were 4 bit pseudo-Delta/Sigma converters and they stated that they went the low bit route instead of a pure 1 bit Delta/Sigma converter because of jitter issues, but that was the 1990's... But it must not be easy to keep clock accurary at such high speeds.

 

Meh. Christopher Cross sounds about as good as Gaucho, which I think is one of the best sounding recordings ever made.

Likewise The Nightfly.

Early '80s digital could sound very good, assuming it was properly engineered for digital. Most recordings weren't. But then, engineering trends and the sonic signature of '80s recordings in general were a big step down from the mid '70s thru early '80s heyday of hi-fi pop music.

The big clue here - analog recordings from the mid '80s thru early '90s virtually always sound just as harsh and brittle as the digital stuff, if not worse since they often layer muddiness and grain on top of the problem.

Oddly enough, even by the mid-'80s it was becoming impossible to tell good digital from good analog recordings - the arrival of digital really forced the producers of analog equipment to up their game. Pet Shop Boys Actually, Introspective and Behaviour all sound incredible - Actually in particular sports bass like I'd never heard from an analog recording before. Actually was cut on one of those Mitsubishi digital multitracks. I'm not sure if Behaviour was all digital - might have been mixed down to analog, for the tape saturation.

I'd always assumed kd lang's Ingenue was digital, but it was an analog recording. Tape hiss is imperceptible, and it's smooth as glass, with a cool but rich sound. Dolby SR most likely. Annie Lennox recorded Diva at home digitally around the same time and it has a remarkably similar sound. These were all production choices - it had nothing to do with the recording technology anymore by that point, which had reached parity on most specs and in overall sound.

 

It should be noted that the CD rot effects only the very early issues of this set with red labels; the problem was quickly corrected and the set reissued without the red ink on the discs.