When did recording studios switch to digital recording from tape?

Dress You Up sounds like a drum machine to me.

 

I'll have to look up the credits.

 

To me, that grittiness shows up in songs like "White Heat".

 

Synthesizer does not necessarily mean digital.

 

I know, there are also analogue synthesizers like the ones used by Wendy/Walter Carlos like the ones used on the soundtracks for Clockwork Orange, The Shinning and Tron, if memory serves me well. But synthesizers used on Like A Virgin sound digital to me. Of the two Madonna's "Like A" I much prefer Like A Prayer, it not only sounds better, and it's a full digital recording, songs and production are much better IMHO.

 

Almost any pop music album from late 1983 to the early 1990s is likely to be using the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer.

 

Thanks for the info, I always thought this Synth was digital.

 

The pop cliche of the 1980's to be exact. Overused on many a record of the era, has been used to the point of weaponized. A little Yamaha DX7 goes a long, long way. To audio what Garlic is to cuisine.

 

Madonna used a blend of analog and digital synths on her first two records. For example, the bassline on "Into The Groove" was produced by a Roland Super Jupiter rack, and the horns by a Juno 106. Both were analog synths.



Digital synths were in the mix by '83-'85, but they didn't really take over until after the middle of the decade, when they began to displace analog synths.

 

If there's something I dislike in music is the production and glossy sound of the 80's, my beloved Van Halen albums included. Van Halen's Jump's synth intro is "catchy" to sea the least but God if I hate it. So I dislike how Love Walks In, Why Can't This Be Love or When It's Love because the use of synths, those are great songs ruined by 80's production, the use of Simmons drums, the overly bright and thin sound and yes, synths. I think musicians went too far in the 80's and it doesn't surprise me at least regarding Rock music that in the 90's new bands were back to basics like the 80's had never existed.

 

Great. Unfortunately he doesn't go into the piano solo featured in the "You Can Dance" Remix, which has always been my favourite part of that song (starts at 5:15)

 

Two playback heads: one the preview head, the other signal going to the cutter head.

 

It seems to me that Telarc started the revolution to exclusively recording in digital. That was a few years before CD players were marketed to us.

Luckily for the mainstream studios, and for the preservation of their classic recordings, they started recording in digital about the same time as they found out of their master tapes were rapidly degrading from tape "Sticky Shed". So they were able to transfer their analog recordings to digital, dump the old tapes in the trash, and now dumpster-diving audiophiles and music collectors have the original master tapes in their private collections, properly preserving them. Unfortunately, if one of us wants a tape-to-tape copy, they charge $400 or more for each one.

 

Facts: NO digital multitrack recorders available until the 3M Digital Mastering System was available, then the Sony DASH machines, followed by Mitsubishi's ProDigi system machines. All these incompatible systems with each other. Before that time, the few digital recording systems were two channel only. All were severely expensive, all of them temperamental.

 

Because they are hand-made, hence the high cost.

No commercial digital multi-track system, maybe, but from the link I gave towards the start of this thread (on the history of digital recording):

Around the same time NHK was perfecting the stereo PCM audio recorder, the British Broadcasting Corporation was experimenting with using PCM technology to improve television broadcast audio quality. The BBC's challenge was to improve the quality of the transmission lines between their broadcast center and far-flung transmitters. Their solution, deployed in 1972, was a 13-channel PCM system, with audio converted to digital at the broadcast center and converted back to analog at the transmitters. The system was still in use 10 years later. BBC Research Department also developed in the early 1970s a 2-channel PCM recorder, and some of these technologies were later licensed to 3M, which unveiled its Digital Mastering System in late 1977.

 

Starting in the early 1970s, there was a device called a 'CCD' delay line, which used similar semiconductor technology as the early TV sensors. It is called a 'bucket brigade' technology where the charge is passed along as in a shift register (but analog instead of digital) from element to element. CCD delay lines were also often used in TV chroma/luma separation and reverb and analog FIR filters. (I got to play with one of the first full NTSC resolution CCD imaging devices -- for a long timeframe -- in the early 1970's. It also had the added benefit of strong IR sensitivity. It was *really* cool back then, with an amazing totally accurate geometry. Back then, camera tubes where not always very accuate. Each one (there were two at the time -- the manufacturer had the other one) was worth well over $100k in early '70s dollars. It was experimental for military purposes for use on missiles.)

John

 

Ouch! Love the Sony snark!

dan c

 

True but listen to something like “Living La Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin, it’s harsh and smeared. There’s a lot of records that sound like that from that era.

 

And BBC Research and BBC Engineering in that era, was among the finest in the field of audio, RF communications, and in electronic research and design. BBC then designed and built a lot of it's own equipment, around it's needs.

 

The first commercially available digitally recorded album was Ry Cooder's:Bop Til You Drop.1979.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

No, it was not! Again, I don't understand why people are not reading the reference I linked to at the start of this thread. From pg. 14 of that paper:


The Dawn of Digital -- The "Firsts"

First digitally-recorded commercial release:
"Something" by Steve Marcus and Jiroh Inagaki (Nippon Columbia NCB-7003)
Recorded in Tokyo, September 1970 (Denon prototype system)

First digitally-recorded classical album:
Mozart: String Quartet No. 17 in B flat minor, K.458 'Hunt'
Smetana Quartet (Nippon Columbia NCC-8501)
Recorded 24-26 April 1972, Aoyama Tower, Tokyo (Denon DN-023R)

First all-digital recording in Western Europe intended for commercial release:
Bach: Musical Offering, BWV 1079
Paillard Chamber Orchestra (Denon OX-7021)
Recorded 2-3 December 1974, Notre Dame de Rose, outside Paris (Denon DN-023R)

First all-digital recording in U.S.A. intended for commercial release:
"On Green Dolphin Street" by Archie Shepp (Denon MJ-7262)
Recorded 28 November 1977 at Sound Ideas, NYC (Denon DN-034R)

First all-digital classical recording in U.S.A. intended for commercial release:
Holst: Suites for Military Band Nos. 1 and 2 / Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks /
Bach: Fantasie in G major
Frederick Fennel conducting the Cleveland Symphonic Winds (Telarc 5038)
Recorded 4-5 April 1978 at Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio (Soundstream)

First Grammy Award-winning Digital Recording:
Copland: Appalachian Spring/ Ives: Three Places in New England
Dennis Russell Davies conducting the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (Sound80 DLR-101)
Recorded June 1978 at Sound80 Studio, Minneapolis, Minnesota (3M prototype system)
Winner - Grammy Award, Best Chamber Music Album, 1979.

First all-digital classical commercial recording by a European company:
"New Year's Day in Vienna"
Willi Boskovsky conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (DeccaD147D2/ London LDR-100012)
Recorded 1 January 1979 at the Muskikvereinsaal, Vienna (Decca system)

Etc: Early Digital Recording released Later (thus, not a "First")
Virgil Fox -"The Digital Fox" volumes 1 & 2 (Ultragroove UG-9001 and UG-9002)
Recorded 28-31 August 1977 at Garden Grove Community Church, California
(Soundstream prototype system)

NOTE: The Soundstream prototype was an adjunct system to these direct-to-disc sessions. The Soundstream
tapes were released as LPs in 1981.

 

"The album was the first digitally recorded major-label album in popular music"
Bop till You Drop - Wikipedia

 

That came out in 1999, though. Digital compression was starting to really hit pop music.

 

Why do people keep saying that when it's patently false? The first digitally recorded commercial release came out in 1970. Cooder's album was the first digitally-recorded pop/rock record released.

Nobody's heard Bop 'Til You Drop though, so it's pretty much only of interest as a trivia question (it's here on Spotify, but I've got no idea how good the quality of their master is - sounds fine on my computer's speakers, whatever that's worth). But pretty much everybody alive in America at the time heard something off of the next few digital pop/rock releases, including (supposedly - there's some controversy about this) Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life Of Plants", Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and in particular Christopher Cross, which came out in December of '79, was the 6th biggest album of the year in the US, went 5x Platinum and spawned 4 Top 20 singles, including a #1 and a #2 hit.

Oh, and it won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

It was cut on 3M's 32-track digital recorder - the first machine of its kind - and it sounded and still sounds amazing.