On Mon, 2012-12-24 at 10:45 +0100, Florian Paul Schmidt wrote:
Friends and I made tests with best studio equipment available, but we
never made double blind tests, those tests were blind tests or they were
completely not blind.
It's possible to get the same results with analog and digital equipment
and only to get the wanted colouration.
For home studios analog has got the better colouration, regarding to
tape saturation, you can't control neither digital nor analog
colouration for a home studio.
Tubes don't need to colourize the sound. Other than Neumann, the Brauner
VM1 e.g. doesn't cut sound by path filters, the sound quality of the VM1
is caused by the capsule, that's why not all microphones do sound equal,
some have colouration, others don't colourize the sound. If somebody
ordered a stereo pair of the VM1, Mr. Brauner and I selected the
microphones without doing blind tests, without measurements, just by
singing and speaking into the microphone. If you have experiences in
listening, this is easy to do, at least no customer ever was
unsatisfied. For guitar amps there's colourisation, because the amps are
build this way, e.g. by using Celestion speakers.
That a lot of tube equipment does colour the sound that much is
regarding to bad tubes and bad circuits.
I guess there are several articles from Mr. Brauner in the VDT-Magazin,
however, he also has his knowledge from books, such as Winfried
Knobloch's "Röhrentechnik ganz modern", Pflaum Verlag München, ISBN
3-7905-0660-5. Unfortunately it was stopped to continue knowledge about
tubes around 15 years ago by e.g. Elektor-Verlag, but they provided some
good books about tube circuits. I guess they even stopped to sell
Horowitz/Hill "The Art Of Electronics" ("Die Hohe Schule Der
Elektronik").
It's often written that digital should be better regarding to the
"neutral" sound quality, but I recognized that the knowledge about
discrete analog circuits is gone. There are studios that still record
analog, they don't use samples, but provide Melotrons and other gear.
So using digital and than using samples that emulate Melotrons, Moogs
etc., to add a saturation plug etc. never ever will sound as good as an
analog production using a Meltron, Moogs etc. and a tape recorder.
People often claim that digital should sound better, more neutral, but
than they try to get all kinds of emulations. To "produce sound" we want
colouration. It's possible to use professional analog gear, to get no
colouration, but we want colouration.