Tarekith wrote:
Stromkraft - A lot of people prefer the warmer/duller sound of something like vinyl (not me personally), the flaws are part of the attraction and gives it the vibe they like. It doesn't make them "wrong" just because you don't agree with it. You need to keep an open mind to the fact that not everyone works the way you do, and stop putting people down because they like things differently than you. Nothing wrong with sharing your point of view too (as well as all the valuable help you provide), but you're so incredibly negative sometimes when you disagree with how or why other people do things. It's art man, all opinions are valid, not everyone works the same way to create it or does it for the same reasons. :)
Analogue sound
I also prefer analogue sound and I love the sound of Vinyl, so my previous post wasn't about this. It's more about how I cannot go along with "magical thinking" in music production or DJ discussions, however much I may love to marvel in this myself. I will not be quiet about this as this is where many newbies go wrong applying recipes instead of learning to think like a producer (I view DJs as both artists and producers, even though this varies how much of each). Waving magic product flags, or magic formats in this case, is unacceptable to me. I suggest that if you want to state that a format is better then please also supply arguments how exactly it's better.
Expressing Opinions
I don't see here that my stance on what's correct with audio quality vs Vinyl or Digital is putting anyone down. I don't see anyone else expressing an opinion different from mine is putting me down, so I don't see how expressing mine can be harmful.
It's perfectly possible that two, on the surface contradictory opinions on something can both be right.
Learning from differing opinions
When we have different opinions and we listen to each other we might learn something, for example discover that we didn't mean the same thing exactly and that our collective data is complementary. But that doesn't mean anyone must start with accepting claims that border on magical thinking.
Solid arguments for the Vinyl sound
In this case, there are a few arguments that can be viewed as remaining solid for the case of Vinyl and that is if your vinyl cutting process involves stages where you use unique products, or someone applies unique talents that they or someone else cannot reproduce in the digital process.
Vinyl mastering and printing process
As this process from Master to Vinyl are adding sonic steps — You should know a lot more about this than I do — that a producer or label may choose not to mimic in the digital release,
you could very well end up with 2 products with the same content that do sound different. You, or someone else, may also prefer one of those formats, so this is
a strong second argument I think.
I argue though that what you actually prefer is not the format, but the additional processing.
Emulating Vinyl production processing steps
In many cases, not all I assume, this additional processing may be emulated with products like
Abbey Road Vinyl and similar. Not two similar production chains are exactly the same though. But which is the best processing isn't something you can decide based on formats alone.
100% Analogue Production Chain
A third argument that I already mentioned previously is that with a completely analogue chain, including only analogue instruments, going all the way to Vinyl you will end up with a product that hardly can be made to sound exactly the same in a parallel digital production chain. If this analogue path is something you like, then this is a perfectly valid approach to music production. But then you don't DJ this material in Live unless you record it which kind of makes all of this another discussion.
If you couldn't make a digital product sound as good is another question. I'd argue here that any given chain of selections of tools and applying specific processes may result in equally fine sounding end products, yet these might be somewhat different.
DJing and formats
I'm leaving aside playback systems here as this discussion actually is about DJ'ing in
Live and as far as I know there is no support for even Vinyl control in
Live, even less so Analogue Vinyl audio signals. And when DJing with Vinyl there are few effective ways to change the tempo without affecting pitch, which makes digital Djing quite superior in many cases. Personally, I don't think Live's Warp methods are good enough for Djing.
