Quote:
Originally Posted by DVtyro
Seriously cannot figure out where all the people who love ANY analog stuff including horrible low-speed high-noise high-W&F garbage come from. Digital has been a revelation, a great improvement across the board and an equalizer in that both rich and poor can now get the same great quality for peanuts. Before the digital age, good analog quality did cost a pretty penny, and good analog video quality was not accessible even to wealthy people unless they owned a personal TV studio.
In terms of audio, the best consumer analog media was sourced from digital sources, like DDD/Digalog audio cassettes, they were the best.
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I will counter this argument in that digital does not always mean "better" in terms of overall sound quality. During the 1980's digital revolution many of the recordings were sweetened and tailored to the medium giving them a very stark and edgy sound, just because the CD label said DDD that did not make it any better. Some labels were better at the digital mastering than others, Windham Hill and Telarc and DMP were a few of the early pioneers who set the bar that is still in place today.
I'm not going to argue that linear VHS stereo is anything better than dictation quality regardless of the recording, most decks after about 1985 thinned down the capstan flywheel throwing what little stability to the curb to save a few pennies. The early days of Betamax also had linear stereo and running in B-1 was roughly the same speed as a cassette tape.
AFM recordings be it VHS Betamax or BetacamSP are all analog mediums that are written along with the video content by the head drum, VHS uses depth multiplexing while Beta is mixed in between the chroma and luma carriers. Running at this recording rate the wow & flutter is on the bottom of the scale, dynamic range is in the mid 90 db's and it doesn't suffer from temporial aliasing when the upper end of the sampling rate is exceeded (22.050khz). There's no quantizitaion error or jitter with the AFM recording and the medium has been used for mastering.
I have both analog and digital recorders from the professional arenas and as a producer of training materials I prefer to stay with the digital side for the ease of NLE while my audio and video archival work is more analog oriented using BetacamSP as a capture medium.
What is considered "best" is really based on ones opinion and like comparing apples to apples it all comes down to prefrence, I like the juicy red ones.