[Scott Dorsey]

In article , Neil wrote:
During the "dawn of digital" one could see the potential for new
production techniques, but it wasn't realized until about a decade after
studios had to decide what they were going to do. For example, the 3M
and other digital recorders were still based on reels of tape, so
retakes were required and splicing was out.

Right. And that sort of thing continued on in the small studio world with
systems like ADAT, for quite some time. I'd consider those "transitional
systems." They have all of the disadvantages of analogue production techniques
with all the disadvantages of early digital sound quality.

It was possible to splice DASH tapes, though, although 3M format was not
spliceable. In theory it's possible to splice Mitsubishi tapes but in
practice it's a horror.

In the meantime, classic
electronic music (read, synthesizer techniques aka musique concrete)
dominated the disco scene, and bands that previously would go to a
studio to record their demos were using Tascam gear at home, so the
money was siphoned off.

I avoided that whole movement myself, thank God. I might even still have
a DISCO SUCKS t-shirt somewhere.

There wasn't anything really wrong with solid state electronics per se,
even in the '60s. There was some bad design using transistors, but there
was also some excellent gear.

People were continuing to design like they did in the tube era. Lots of
capacitively-coupled gain stages with global feedback. The problem with
doing this is that the low impedances meant huge capacitors were needed,
so we wound up with electrolytic coupling all over the place. Transistors
were mostly slow, so slew-limiting became a problem very fast. The attitude
that adding more negative feedback would clean anything up was reasonable in
the tube world but suddenly didn't hold water.

Not to mention that germanium transistors were not either linear or
temperature-stable. Biasing them with a single leakage resistor like a
tube kind of works.... but isn't such a good plan if you care about
stability or distortion.

A lot of techniques and a lot of reasonable assumptions in the tube world
suddenly didn't apply.

It took years before people to figure out tricks like DC coupling, constant
current sources, symmetric low-level stages, etc. It's a different mindset
entirely: you have more gain than you know what to do with and you can use
as many active devices as you want.

What I think musicians had a problem with
is that solid state didn't mask artifacts such as the odd harmonics that
were a part of the overdrive they liked. But, that was easily dealt
with, too, if one knew what they were dealing with.

I came from the classical world, where people actually did want recordings
that sounded like the performance, so I didn't see so much of that. What
I saw were devices that had great distortion numbers on the datasheet but
actually very high even-harmonic distortion in practical applications.
(And yes, it's true that odd harmonics can mask some of that, which is why
early attempts at going transformerless had mixed results...)
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."