Welcome to the forum Tony!
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Thank you. I try to mind my own business when I can.
dCS tech has never let me down since I was their first UK customer for one of their professional a/d converters a long time ago. Bartok has pride of place in my editing room.
Re. overshoots : a lot of professional digital audio tech uses 32bit (or even 64bit) architecture for storage, mixing and processing. That way we can forget about digital overshoots while working on material by building 12dB or more digital headroom in the system. Then we sort the end product out in the final stage of delivery to a 24bit or 16bit fileset for release.
Most clipping I hear sounds like analogue circuitry running seriously out of steam and cracking up.
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dCS904 adcs and dCS954 dacs have pride of place in our recording rig.
p.s. the rack containing them is very heavy.
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Welcome @TonyF - Your Brahms/SCO/Mackerras cycle is among my favourite recordings.
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That’s good. They are fine honest performances. Usher Hall in Edinburgh.
I am pretty sure we used two Neumann valve M250c mics. Two channels of E.A.R. valve mic preamps made by Tim de Paravicini. dCS904 a/d converters.
You cannot do everything with just two mics, but on this occasion it worked. I bought these mics from RCA NY and they had been part of the “Living Stereo” kit.
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Off topic again, but I can trace my interest in dCS back to reading the engineering colophons of some of my first classical music recordings. Hyperion, Telarc etc. As a kid, I bought these because of the performances/gramophone reviews, but a pattern emerged… Why do these recordings sound so good? Who is Tony Faulkner? Who is dCS, what are these tube microphones? Those production colophons kicked off a lifetime interest in learning about classical music and recording… So in short, thank you for capturing the spirit of the artists and music I love so much!
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Thank you. I am touched - (which my family knew already).
Returning to the topic: details like inter-sample overs are fixable and worth fixing, but hardly the greatest of digital audio’s problems of turning music to shouty anonymous compressed mush when you monkey around with it too much.
I have returned to analogue live mixing which is helping to keep the quality flag flying. I have not migrated to using networked recording systems rather than analogue microphone cabling and I believe that is worthwhile. Most of my colleagues have gone down the network route, with multiple remote active stage boxes which have to do quite a lot of tricks with clocking - and clocking is a vulnerability for digital audio sound quality.
I am still not a digi-phobe. However I am more aware that when you mess with digits, the perceived sound quality and sense of dynamics degrade worrying quickly - digital audio is fragile. Once an engineer adds digital reverb to try to liven the mix up the party is over - everything becomes flat, formulaic and generic.
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Amen! Very well said, and we should all take note of that.
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