I find this an interesting area
Standing at 2010 ............I would say with modern valve technology .............it is hard to beat a good well engineered valve level recoding ...........................when it is reproduced by a modern valve system you have a hard to beat standard.
I would also argue that on the reproduction side..............good solid state systems can have a good run for their money.
On the recording front I think we have two schools:
Up to the late sixties .............valve technology was still common in recording studios and if handled well it could give a great sound ................to be it lack real ultra bass but the overall all sound is warm ad detailed............if pushed ard it forgives mistakes and can even sound distinctive if pushed hard in the correct directions.................Background noise can be a problem especially in non dolby days ( Listen to the original pressings of Abbey Road and you can hear tape hiss and some valve noise but that can be charming.
Solid state recording delivered a crisp clean sound with good bass extension but something of the close physical contact with the recording is lost. It can be clinical but a good engineer/ producer can overcome that. Dynamics can be a little squeezed ......and the extreme top can be thin ...Abuse is much more marked ( although as tape technology improved this tended to fade into the background.
Tracks ...................50s and early 60s saw us with 2 tracks only ..............no a lot of scope if you were he producer and limited overdubbing ( See the early Beatles reissues to see how limited it can get) You can " bounce it down a few times but in analogue the background noise needed to be cleverly controlled)
In the US 3 track seemed to be the common wat giving two tracks for the " music " and one for the
vocal.............this can remove the "hole in the middle stereo affect" but this type of recording suffered from the lack of top end on the edge tracks ( As does most multitrack)
4, 8 and 16 came and even 64 track...............each giving its enlargement of the art ( Poor Mike OLdfield would have been hard pressed to do Tubular Bells " without it and with better noise reduction we got to a peak...............
Onto digital and perfection should have been achieved ( OR so they told us !!!) however, here we see an odd thing .............technically the standards were high but our ears told us that something was missing..................the first digital recordings I came across had thin brittle sound to them ( Later we are old that this was a software fault and has since been improved upon) and now we have a great sound but still something is lacking. The real top end Hi-Fi people still say that analogue is superior if well set up and some recording studios still use some forms of analogue in some ares of recording .
Opinions?
![[Image: perfecting_sound_m_1457948f.jpg]](http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01457/perfecting_sound_m_1457948f.jpg)
