Digital Recording

Canadian May Fan wrote:

brENsKi wrote:
forgive me for any level of ignorance here, i hope someone more technically minded can either back up what i say, or explain why i got it wrong but my understanding of the digital vs analogue argument was always one about the end product and the medium used at sale, rather than the recording method:
1. analogue vinyl has always had a greater feel of warmth about it, it seems to capture the "harmonics and atompsphere present" when the recording took place, where as early cds/dvds and (later) dolby tapes often felt cold clinical and life-sucking on playback...almost like the soul of the music had been removed
2. as regards the actual recording process....digital has to be better. there's more purity and reliability. whereas analogue was prone to wear and tear....it didn't take much overdubbing and bouncing for analogue to "lose" quality. whereas every digital copy is as good as the first, and much easier to fix errors, and tweak sound levels.
3. however, that last sentence may well be where the problem lay. digital recording was still a newish thing in 1990, and human error at production stage may well have crept in due to unfamiliarity with the software and tools being used.

Not necessarily. Until the last few years, digital recording simply hasn't had the bandwidth to record a lot of data at a practically storable size, so it's had to compress the hell of it just to make it manageable.

Not true. DAT tapes were used, the problem you mention only applies to HD storage.

Also, let's not forget the aesthetic choices that were made. A lot of music from the late '80s and early '90s sounds awful to our ears, but that plastic-like, synthetic sound was all the rage at the time, even though we regard it as "inferior recordings" rather than "aesthetic choice".

"Does control room vocals mean that he didn't sung in the isolation of the studio booth.That happened due to his weakness at the time?"

Basically, yep. He wound up doing a lot of them in the control room as time went on. Control rooms in your average high-end studio are pretty effing comfy places to be. Ideally, that is.

I think they used some multitrack implemented using synced DAT´s (like in Back to the Light) and surely some of the old Brian´s Mac from motorola 68K era.
In the expanded edition of Innuendo notes says Brian told that the drum patterns in ICLWY never worked well until 1997 when software was better.
So i think the limitations of new tools are surely present.

Queen used DASH tapes, not DAT, for recording Miracle/Innuendo and I believe MIH as well (or parts of it?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Stationary_Head

What bit depth were they capable of? Just 16bit?

Richard Orchard wrote: What bit depth were they capable of? Just 16bit?

"With the exception of the Sony PCM-3348HR and Studer D827, all of the DASH recorders have 16-bit resolution with a 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz sampling rate, although it is possible to use an outboard analog-to-digital converter of up to 20-bit resolution. The PCM-3348HR and D827 are capable of  20-bit 96 kHz operation, and are the only machines that still find
significant use today, often in only the highest-end studios for music and film production. All DASH recorders primarily use the SDIF-2 (Sony Digital Interface Format-2) as a digital interface, which is slightly different than the S/PDIF / AES-EBU
that nearly all other digital audio recorders use, but is technically  superior because SDIF-2's word clock is not multiplexed into the bitstream.
Because SDIF-2 is often only found on the expensive DASH recorders, it is also often only found on the highest-end mixing consoles, such as  those made by Solid State Logic."

^ from the Wikipedia article I linked earlier