In an analog recording studio if you hear without any board no engineer straight to tape a recording when it is first heard live then when.?

There is no such an animal as straight to tape. All signals pass through a microphone into a amplifier and then to tape head where signal waves are turned into magnetic values on the tape. You could get pretty close by directly etching the sound onto a wax cylinder from a needle connected to a cone, but the chances the original sound is within the perfect dynamic range of the wax cylinder are very small....Show more

There is a difference.


I didn't read all of your rambling blather
because it is confused and poorly organized,
but I can tell you this:

The more electronic circuitry involved,
the higher the background noise level will be.

Recording on (analog) tape and playing it raises the noise level
because tape has an irreducible noise of its own.



If you did yourself the favour of reading up on the subject
and learning about the technical realities that are involved,
you would (I believe) be grossly embarrassed by the question you posted....Show more

I wish you'd tell us what point you are trying to make or what your question actually is. You sound as if someone has offended you in some way.

Like the others, I really couldn't be bothered to read all of your rant and found what I did read hard to follow. You sound very muddled and confused.

Purely from a hearing perspective (not comparing sound waves or using equipment to analyse sound) I'm sure it is possible to produce a recording that, when played back, is indistinguishable from the original. As I said in one of my other answers, when I play my electronic keyboard through a pair of active speakers the sound is exactly the same as when I listen to a recording of the same instrument through the same speakers (or at least it sounds the same to me).

Generally speaking though, when musical sounds are considered in "the real world", a recoring does not even come close to the original sound from the listener's point of view.

The first issue is actually "hearing" the sound in a way that can be recorded. In the case of natural, acoustic sounds, this requires the use of one or more microphones. Two microphones can produce stereo sound but neither can pick up sound from above, below or behind. The sound picked up by each microphone is very one-dimentional and even combining two of these sounds produce a very poor approximation of what was actually heard by the listen at the time.

Converting the acoustic sound to an electrical signal, sending it down a cable and then through all the electronic componants involved in converting it to a magnetic signal that can be recorded on tape obviously degrades and alters the original "sound".

Some people prefer the sound produced by recording to tape rather than recording digitally and, to me, there is no doubt that tape can produce a warmth and depth often lacking in digital recording and that it has produced some excellent recordings. However, there is no doubt that the process results in a loss of sound quality and that tape noise is a significant problem. If a consistently loud sound is recorded onto tape then any tape noise is masked and cannot be heard but when recording anything with any dynamic range (such as music) tape noise is a problem. When recording live music on a well set-up 1/2 track machine, such as a Revox, running at 15 ips then any tape noice is unlikely to be noticed but tape noise on a 24 track machine can be VERY noticeable. It is for this reason that compression/limiting were used more or less routinely, that Dolby and Dbx noise reduction were devoloped and that even running the multitrack macine at 30 ips was tried - to deal with the limitations and problems of recording onto tape that everyone was aware of. In most cases a "record" is not meant to sound like "the real thing" and people do not have the opportunity or the desire to compare, say, the recorded sound of an acoustic guitar with the way it sounded "live, in the studio". If you have never noticed tape noise on a record, even over the top of the surface noice produced by the record itself, then you have not been listening. It should also be noted that whilst noise reduction systems (when set up and used correctly) do indeed, "reduce noise" they have an effect on the actual sound quality of the recording. Compression and limiting have even more effect on the sound.

Most importantly, in many cases, ANY kind of standard recording, reproduced in a standard way can never sound like the actual sound before it was recorded. This is a limitation of the way in which the recording is reproduced, not of the recording process itself. In a "live" situation the room has a huge effect on the sound the listener perceives. They hear sound from all directions - left, right, from the front, from the rear, up and down. Even just moving the stereo speakers to a different position in the same room changes the sound. Listening in a different room, with different speakers and a different amplifier alter the sound significantly. These variations can't ALL be exactly the same as the original!

If I listened to a radio broadcast of a band as they actually played live and then listened to a recording of the same performance repeated later I would expect to hear NO difference at all, but NEITHER would sound like the actual sound being produced "at the time". As I said in answer to one of your previous questions, a singer performing live with their voice being picked up by a microphone, having effects added to it, being eq'ed and then being played at high volume through PA speakers in a huge hall sounds NOTHING like the sound produced acoustically by that singer (the way they might sound singing in your kitchen). Playing a recording of their vocal for them to mime to would probably sound exactly the same but NEITHER is the original sound....Show more

I'm not sure what your question is, it is difficult to piece together from the rambling.
My guess is that you didn't intend to ask a question, but instead you wanted to convince people that you know what you're talking about, and I don't think it will work....Show more