Brief Summary

The link between analogue equipment and its use as a source of colour, saturation and even overt distortion is taken for granted by many but doesn’t reflect the intentions of the designers of much of the classic gear which is so influential today. Why is that and does it matter?

Going Deeper

In Luke’s recent post Why Mix Saturation Is Your Friend he commented on the beneficial effects of saturation on audio. The infinite variations of harmonic distortion, soft clipping and its associated dynamic range compression and spectral signature have become something of an obsession with some engineers. The veil of ‘munge’ (my word) heavy handed use of saturation can have does bring things together into a cohesive, if distorted, whole. It’s an aesthetic choice and like any aesthetic choice there isn’t a strict delineation between right and wrong, good or bad or any other diametrically opposed choices. It’s just a case of do you like it and will anyone else?

Maybe it’s the stylistic association between coloured, imperfect recordings and a retro aesthetic, but the link between these qualities of distortion, imperfect frequency response and other obvious audio deficiencies and analogue equipment has been referenced and sometimes exploited by the creators of plugins to such an extent that the perception of what classic analogue equipment should sound like has been reimagined by a generation of engineers who missed it first time around.

William Wittman’s Take

One such commenter is our own William Wittman who recently posted on Facebook that “If your analogue recording gear is adding “dirt and grit” you should have it repaired”. And he’s right! We asked him to expand on this point, Over to William:

I’m reminded of the experience of mastering a record, especially in the earlier days of digital audio.

Invariably I would arrive at Sterling Sound with my stereo master tape, and we would process this through the desk, in whatever ways were thought desirable, before converting it, through the best A-D converters available, to the CD replication format. And so at some point it was possible therefore to press a button and compare: desk out (still analogue) vs the same signal but through the A-D-A chain. And that button was always the ‘depression’ button. Not only was the digital version obviously ‘different’ but it was always disappointingly worse. Something always felt “missing” about it. And so we learned to stop doing that and, instead, work the whole time listening through the digital chain, because, realistically, that’s where we were going to have to end up and so how we should be making our decisions.

So what’s the point of this story?

It’s that digital wasn’t, and isn’t, as “perfect” as the marketing people wanted to tell you. (Remember “perfect sound forever”?) Having said all that, I’m not dismissing digital recording, obviously. We all use it and we’ve all learned to be happy with the current state of digital audio. But the point remains that if the beauty, or desirability, of analogue audio lay in its distortion or harmonic characteristics then surely the digital copy of those analogue chains should be exactly the same. Right?

Well it’s not.

Somehow, digital often seems to lose something subtle that’s part of what we like about analogue. And this in my view is why so many people seek ways to add back in that ‘analogue character’. (Whether this is successful or not is a matter for another discussion.) But when working in analogue my goal was always for things to sound as good as possible Not once have I ever recorded a snare drum whilst thinking “it’s going to sound better when I play the tape back because of all that distortion and saturation”. Rather we expected the playback to sound as close to desk-out as possible. If the sound came back noticeably darker (‘warmer’) or more distorted (‘grit’?) I would have called in the maintenance engineers to realign and repair the machine!

Now, in digital, we tend to employ that same Jedi mind trick we used at Sterling 20 years ago. Meaning that we tend to only listen through the digital chain, not to desk-out before the conversion. And in doing so we avoid that moment of ‘oh it’s different!’, but we potentially also notice what’s perhaps ‘missing’. But what’s actually ‘missing’ sometimes is still subtle. It’s why the good tape machine simulation plug-ins add a little subtle harmonics and don’t behave like a fuzz pedal.

If there’s something about the sound of 100% analogue recording that people like it’s in those subtleties, and in what it doesn’t lose. It’s not that it makes things dark and dirty, because good quality state of the art analogue did not. Digital marketing slogans to the contrary.

Digital might not be perfect, but as William’s musings remind us it’s important to remember that analogue wasn’t trying not to be perfect! We’ve commented before about the time, skill and effort put into creating analogue equipment by designers of previous years to make that gear as transparent as possible. To represent it otherwise would be simply inaccurate. The degree to which this was achieved of course depends on the period during which the design was created, in spite of all the narratives trying to tell us otherwise, gear designs get better over time. Technology is cumulative. Economics change over time and some gear isn’t profitable to build any more but there isn’t anything magical about old gear which means it can’t be made today, even if it isn’t for other reasons. You can’t buy a new Studer anymore because it’s too expensive. There are products which contain materials which aren’t permitted any more and designs which don’t pass safety standards but there is no ‘lost knowledge of the old times’ which couldn’t be recovered.

Digital Changed Analogue?

Something which has changed since the pre-digital days is that unlike when the last possible drop of fidelity was being wrung out of analogue designs regardless of the law of diminishing returns, an alternative now exists. Digital audio at a stroke solves the most intractable issues which faced analogue designers for so long. Noise was a fact of life and it could only ever be reduced, not eliminated. Linearity was approximate, particularly at the extremes and frequency response may have been good, but was never perfect. If you’re looking for clean, transparent, noise-free and linear then digital achieves this far more efficiently (though as William points out it’s still not perfect). Given how good modern digital is, it’s understandable that when people choose to use analogue technology in a digital world it is usually for reasons other than transparency. 

But that doesn’t mean that gear from the pre-digital days was designed to be coloured, or distorted or characterful, let alone ‘gritty’. It was usually designed to sound as good as possible. But when everyone already has access to clean, transparent processing, a clean, transparent emulation of a pre-digital piece of hardware is a tough sell. Of far more appeal is to highlight the unintended, but much admired way in which this equipment, which often in its day was state of the art, degrades and sound when outside of the levels it typically would be in normal use, thereby imparting that elusive quality - Character.

Professional analogue equipment is still in production today. Leaving reproductions of historical equipment to one side, as they trade on authenticity and therefore change as little as possible, most new designs are created with overt colour being a consideration if not a design goal. A good example is the subtle inclusion of a trim control on my BAE 1073 which attenuates all the way from unity down to nothing rather than a +/-10dB trim as found on the Neve equivalent. This allows very deliberate overdriving to be pulled back to acceptable levels rather than a more ‘correct’ use of a trim control. Taking things further some designs have dedicated functions designed to mash and mangle (‘Nuke’ button anyone?). It’s all good fun. However the sonic fingerprint of good analogue studio gear was supposed to be subtle.

But other gear isn’t subtle at all. A guitar amp turned up to 11 or a Moog filter with its resonance all the way up isn’t subtle, why should a mic preamp not be the same? Well that depends on where you think a mic preamp sits in the production process. The difference is between sound production and sound reproduction.

Sound Production Vs Reproduction

If you play your favourite reference track through a guitar amplifier it will sound dreadful. Harsh, middly and probably distorted. But that doesn’t mean its a bad piece of equipment, its sonic fingerprint is being used to create a guitar sound. Accurately representing the output of the guitar isn’t its intended purpose, it creates the sound in combination with the sound of the guitar. Faithfully capturing the sound of an instrument with a microphone may or may not be a priority depending on the instrument and the production, A classical engineer would want to capture the sound of the instruments as transparently as possible as the sound has already been ‘produced’ and the intention is for the mic to reproduce that sound accurately. The same isn’t necessarily true of a mic on the previously discussed guitar amp. If the choice of mic or mics is being used to create the timbre rather than reproduce it that is perfectly legitimate. The transition from production to reproduction hasn’t yet been made.

This distinction between sound production and sound reproduction is real but it isn’t strict. This is perhaps what gets confusing about the parallel intentions of fidelity and colour in audio equipment. Playback systems really ought to be as flat as is possible, yes flattering voicing exists in headphones and speakers but overt distortion isn’t a design goal. Studio outboard, mic preamps and the like are a less clear cut case. Some gear designs are sonically pristine, others are proud to impose a sound of their own onto the audio which passes through them. This in itself isn’t new, but perhaps the amount of distortion is something which is blurring then lines between shaping the sound and reproducing the sound.

Digital When It Was New And Exciting

The distance in terms of time between where we are now and the pre-digital days when there was no alternative to analogue forms something of a generational divide. I’m in my early 50s and I started working in studios in the very last days of analogue tape. We had DAT and digital multitrack was on the horizon but our multitrack was analogue. Digital was new and exciting and ‘better'. The lack of tape noise and the extended HF response was amazing to us in a way which can't be appreciated today. Conversely cassette tapes were everything which was bad about analogue. The poor frequency response and noise performance could be tuned out by the listener, we were pretty used to it. The thing which was harder to put up with was variations in tape speed - wow and flutter. While I don't like the ‘analog noise’ some brands insist on adding to plugins, and I invariably turn off, I absolutely wouldn’t tolerate a plugin which added wow and flutter. I'm happy to leave that back in the 80s.

In an interesting exchange on a recent podcast both Steve DeMott and I, who are both the same age, had a very different reaction to a cassette emulation plugin Ashea had found. Our frustrations with the format immediately came back, with both of us howling in horror at something she, over 20 years younger than us, saw as nothing more than an aesthetic and stylistic choice. While its true that the truth of what analogue gear was about has been distorted (in both senses of the word) over time, perhaps the preoccupation with analogue as a source of colouration is actually a response which is based more in open-mindedness than it is in misunderstanding. What do you think?