Analog:
The combination of Magnetic Tape, Large format Consoles, Tube/SSL preamps and outboard gear. So on and so forth. Sound travels from mic to preamp, through the console to the tape machine, back to the console and through the near field monitors. Pretty simple. What happens in all of this is that the combination of this gear colors the sound in such a way that can be either pleasing or unpleasing. Normally based on the choice of gear, be it cheap or expensive. This has become a very fine art and today very few actually excell at this process. When done well, the results are truly astonishing. But when I say it colors the sound, I actually mean that it's adding noise. Which you might think is a bad thing but actually isn't (though it can be), and can tend to sound very pleasing to the ear. Another point of fact is that analog degrades in quality the more it's transferred from medium to medium. Not a hell of a lot that I've seen, but thats whats said.
Digital:
The combination of Computers, A/D converters, Tube/SSL preamps, plugin effects, and optional outboard gear. Sound travels from mic to preamp, to A/D converters, to computer hard disk, manipulated through DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, e.g. Pro-Tools, Nuendo), to D/A converters back to Near Field Monitors. No color is added except by the choice of mics and preamps used before the conversion process. Commonly called transparent by advocates, and sterile by those who prefer analog. Another point of fact is that the audio is a digital representation of analog sound, or samples. These samples are of course made up of 1's and 0's. I'd go into Nyquist's thereom about how many samples are needed to accurately represent sound, but I see no point since you can look it up if your interested. Sample rates start at 44.1 Khz and end at 192 Khz. If you listen to CD's you are listening to digital, at 44.1 Khz 16bits. Digital normally has it's color added to it by plugin effects, or outboard gear if it can be accessed on the outward conversion. Digital does not degrade over time.
So Which is Better:
Neither. If your talking from a sound point of view at least. One of my instructors when I was in school said "they're different flavors". Which I agree with for the most part. Analog captures a much larger spectrum of frequencies. So large in fact that we can't even hear all the frequencies it absorbs. Apparently, however, we are able to feel many of these frequencies. Sounds great I'm sure. But I can honestly say most people, either don't know that, or don't care. After all, the most popular medium is Mp3, an even lower fidelity format than CD. So if this is the case why doesn't everyone record to analog tape? Two reasons. One, it's extremely expensive, and two, editing analog tape is no fun, and pretty much a joke if you ask me. Ok well that said, only the really big bands must record to analog tape, right? Uhmm...yes and no. Most big studio's use a little of both, but it always ends up on the Computer to be edited and then transfered to CD or Mp3 format, which pretty much throws the spectrum of "feeling" out the window. So they take the best of both worlds and deliver a stellar product? Sure, but still quite expensive. So how does one make a strictly digital format sound as good? By Knowing THE RULES.
The Rules:
Back when analog recording was the standard, different rules applied. Engineers might drive they're tubes or over-saturate they're analog tape to create some cool sound additions to the original signal. The amount of headroom they had to work with was pretty good and they were pretty safe when clipping the signal, cause it would just add a natural compression to the sound, rolling it off nice and smooth. Not so with digital. With less headroom to work with and the result of irritating digital distortion when clipping the signal, caused many an engineer to dislike digital. Well what a surprise! All this time working on analog systems and the moment a big name engineer tries digital, he immediately says, " this is crap", then everyone says,"then it must be true". Unfortunately, that name engineer had no idea what he was doing or talking about. Well, I guess it was a bummer to him that he couldn't do things the way he was used to doing them. Still, it doesn't mean he was right. So how do you get digital to sound just as good? Simple actually. Obviously using decent mics, preamps, and converters, is first of all key in either format, (Crap in-Crap out) and compression. If Analog tape naturally compresses the signal when the signal breaches Zero, then obviously in digital you might try recording around minus 3 to 4, and then throw a slight compression on the signal. And just like that you get something pretty much similar, minus a few other tricks. There are of course other ways of doing this that work a little better, but they're still within the digital format and don't even touch into the analog way of things. Aside from that, you don't actually always want tape saturation or compression on every sound you record. If you've ever heard what that sounds like you know what I mean. It's actually quite bad. Over-compression is a common problem on both formats, but most of the time, in the analog world, engineers will say,"I actually didn't use any compressors at all. I don't need to". Nice try buddy, but you actually did use compression in a sense, even if you didn't know it. We can't forget about harmonic distortion. Analog gear can do wonders to a signal by adding harmonic distortion as well. Yet again. Same principle. There are plugins and less expensive gear that can give this effect quite easily. I actually do like analog. Digital still isn't quite like working with Analog. So if your accustomed to it, can afford it, and an audio purist you might as well just stick with it. Though, I personally believe that with todays computers and processing capabilities, along with decent SSL/Tube preamps and mics, digital is just as good if not better than analog. Sessions go much faster due to extremely quick and lossless editing and much tighter punch-ins and overall simultaneous tracking capabilities in the digital realm. And it's only going to get better.
Back when analog recording was the standard, different rules applied. Engineers might drive they're tubes or over-saturate they're analog tape to create some cool sound additions to the original signal. The amount of headroom they had to work with was pretty good and they were pretty safe when clipping the signal, cause it would just add a natural compression to the sound, rolling it off nice and smooth. Not so with digital. With less headroom to work with and the result of irritating digital distortion when clipping the signal, caused many an engineer to dislike digital. Well what a surprise! All this time working on analog systems and the moment a big name engineer tries digital, he immediately says, " this is crap", then everyone says,"then it must be true". Unfortunately, that name engineer had no idea what he was doing or talking about. Well, I guess it was a bummer to him that he couldn't do things the way he was used to doing them. Still, it doesn't mean he was right. So how do you get digital to sound just as good? Simple actually. Obviously using decent mics, preamps, and converters, is first of all key in either format, (Crap in-Crap out) and compression. If Analog tape naturally compresses the signal when the signal breaches Zero, then obviously in digital you might try recording around minus 3 to 4, and then throw a slight compression on the signal. And just like that you get something pretty much similar, minus a few other tricks. There are of course other ways of doing this that work a little better, but they're still within the digital format and don't even touch into the analog way of things. Aside from that, you don't actually always want tape saturation or compression on every sound you record. If you've ever heard what that sounds like you know what I mean. It's actually quite bad. Over-compression is a common problem on both formats, but most of the time, in the analog world, engineers will say,"I actually didn't use any compressors at all. I don't need to". Nice try buddy, but you actually did use compression in a sense, even if you didn't know it. We can't forget about harmonic distortion. Analog gear can do wonders to a signal by adding harmonic distortion as well. Yet again. Same principle. There are plugins and less expensive gear that can give this effect quite easily. I actually do like analog. Digital still isn't quite like working with Analog. So if your accustomed to it, can afford it, and an audio purist you might as well just stick with it. Though, I personally believe that with todays computers and processing capabilities, along with decent SSL/Tube preamps and mics, digital is just as good if not better than analog. Sessions go much faster due to extremely quick and lossless editing and much tighter punch-ins and overall simultaneous tracking capabilities in the digital realm. And it's only going to get better.
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