Newsgroups: alt.electronics.manufacture.circuitboard,alt.engineering.electrical,sci.electronics.basics,sci.engr.electrical.compliance
Subject: Re: SIGNAL TRANSMISSION - unresolved question
References:  <[email protected]>  <[email protected]> <[email protected]>  <[email protected]>  
"Jack"  writes:

> Perhaps YOU think we dont know how to make analog audio recordings that are
> as good as digital ones, but being a musician and a producer myself,  
> i can assure you that
> any top-level analog studio gives a hell of a kick to any recordings.

You can make a hell of a good analogue recording and very good digital
recordings. I have heard both of them.

> Perhaps you forgot that when any original analog source is digitized, 
> it suffers much loss.

When you digitize the analog source to the bits it suffers some loss.
But then when those bits are copied form media to antoherm they can
be copied without any loss though the processing chain.

In analogue tape case the when the sound is stored to the
analogue tape, it will also suffer some loss. That loss
different than those caused by digitialization process,
but it is always there with any analogue storage media.
Depending on the quality of the tape and quality of the
digitalization process, the loss might be much more or somewhat
less with the analogue tape.
And every time you process, copy or play back an analogue
tape, you get every time more loss. 

> Chopping tape to bits does NOT improve quality, my friend.

True. Byt chopping the sound directly to bits from
the microphone withough going to analogue tape gives
you better digitla output than first toring the signal
to the analogue tape and then digitazing the results from
there. In this way you get away from the losses caused
by the nalogue tape system (unless those losses are
favourable characteristics on the sound you are looking for,
sometimes the losses caused by some not so good equipments
are used beause they degrade the sound in a way which suits
to the music sound).

> Master tape reels that never come out
> of the studio ARE the best quality achieved in the studio, 
> while the CD you got at home has been chopped down to 16 bits 
> per stereo sample for your sorry consumers needs.

16 bits is well adequate format for played back on normal
consumer equipments.

-- 
Tomi Engdahl (http://www.iki.fi/then/)
Take a look at my electronics web links and documents at 
http://www.epanorama.net/