Ok,I have recieved various emails,comments,thoughts about Analog vs. Digital Recording and while I lay no claim to any expertise, I feel compelled to write further on the subject. I have nothing inherently against Digital Recording,Hey some of my best friends like digital recording! The real crux of this issue for me is how it sounds.I am not averse to technological advances in any way,in fact I welcome them.So,,, Let's go back,I was one of the first kids to jump into the digital pool with the belief that this would somehow improve the sound quality of recordings by ten fold. I started by mixing to digital and sometimes still do for convenience sake,then jumped into full digital recordings.When I analyzed the recordings on multiple playback systems there was just something lacking. Whether the recordings were done on open reel digital machines,adats,computers,the recordings sounded harsh,brittle,and bereft of depth. To take this further I would play recordings made by the same artists in some instance using the same engineers and even the same mastering rooms and the recordings made years prior on analog equipment just sounded better.My personal analogy is that this is like the difference between an oil painting and a water color. So I started asking people I knew who understood a little bit about physics to share their thoughts.Many of them stated,well Nyquists therom this, and blah blah sampling rates and it should be fine, and maybe your a fossil stuck in your ways. As you can see it even got personal. I came away with more questions than answers.Ok So,, what's really going on here ? I set about trying to understand this.There is a great saying that I will paraphrase,"when one is ready to learn, teachers appear".Analog and Digital function in very different ways.digital recognizes .0 nothing or .1 something. Digital favors louder brighter spikier fequencies,these shoot to the top of digitals recognition system while many of the subtlties trail off or get lopped off!Turn up a digital recording it will feel like chewing on tin foil. A very well known mastering engineer recently stated that doing a digital transfer can lose up to 25% of the recorded information! This would be considered less than subtle even to the average listener because it's an enormous amount of loss and sonic degradation. Digital resolution is around 4,608.000 bits switching per second. Analog tape running at just 15 inches per second delivers around 80.000,000 oriented and randomly structured particles per second.So whaddya think cowboy do you want 4.6 million deelies or 80 million ! Clearly there is a rather significant difference occuring.There are also other factors that the human ear finds pleasing such as harmonic distortion [not the guys in leopard pants kind] that analog characteristcially has,as well as tape compression which adds interesting qualities to the sound of high sound pressure level instruments like drums. Don't believe me ,,go listen to older recordings vs. newer recordings.In well made Analog recordings The Vocals sound comparitivley enormous,the bass has extraordinary depth,the drums sound 50 times larger,all frequencies benefit in every way. Now the practical aspects of this. Digital editing is genius,it would be irresponsible to call analog editing anything other than prehistoric/extinct/goofy from an editing stand point.In recording one is ultimately either going for performances or going for Frankenstein/Auto-Tune/Loop/Program/Hollywood Douchebag/kind of stuff. Yes there can be editing in small and subtle ways but let's be honest here,it typically breaks down into the two very different processes described.I personally want to hear brilliant music and in the end however it is recorded and realized is insignificant. There have been studies done on how and why we percieve and interact with music the way we do. Simply put when one quantizes a recording and removes all of the interperatation we humans don't find it compelling. All of the performance aspects of how a musician phrases a melodic gesture are what all of the poets,philosophers,artists through out the ages have responded to. When the saying "All Art Forms Aspire to be Music' was stated I feel certain they didn't have in mind the freeze dried digital bean dip found in most mainstream stuff. There is something extrordinary in how we make music, the elements people recognize and often term soul are what gets removed from programmed music. On a personal note,I make recordings the way I do because I want to capture the ,,if you will,, 'magic' that happens in a performance,I want all of the details the push and pull of human timing,the wringing of each phrase captured in it's true form.Yes,,This approach can of course be captured digitally.It's just not the same