Who wins the digital numbers game? Not studios, Peter Gleadall discovered

'We've got two Sony digital 24 tracks, and you have to make copies every now and again because the control track wears out. So you either have to hire in another machine every time you need to make a copy or you have two machines in the studio, which works out rather expensive,' notes Alan Winstanley.

This observation has been made by more than one voice in the audio field. Although digital is with us, it isn't at the same time, for many studio managers are still waiting for one format to be agreed upon. They will have a long wait.

This has prompted a great deal of speculation about the demise of analogue and digital tape machines.

With analogue machines, the studio manager isn't forced to choose between two conflicting formats. If he buys a 24-track machine from any manufacturer, a tape made on it will play on any other machine made by any other manufacturer. Until that's the situation with digital-tape machines, then their sales will suffer.

It's not that studio managers are Luddites (the opposite is probably nearer the mark). But when investment in digital multitrack machines starts to approach the cost of a small military coup, can you blame them for waiting for the formats war to end, or for the next generation of digital recording techniques to become available?

Marquee Studio manager Larry Bartlett says, when asked about his preference for analogue, 'Our feeling was that for an investment in the range of £130,000, which is about the rate for 32 tracks of digital, we could get two Studers and have 48 tracks.

'I feel digital is in its infancy now, especially with the incompatibility of the two conflicting formats. And there might be a different format in a year, so where does that leave you? Also, in the not too distant future hard-disc recording will be the format, because you've got SSL and Harrison and others all looking at ways of storing audio on hard disc, in the way that Synclavier does on a small scale.'

Format wars aside, how about the robustness of analogue and digital tape? Just ask anybody who's had to edit digital multitracks: yes, it's a bit of a nightmare with the white gloves and the rivers of sweat. But do people actually edit the multitrack tapes these days? At the recent AES convention, a Sony rep when questioned about the reliability of the editing on their digital multi tracks, replied, 'I suppose it worked out OK, but who edits a multitrack?'

Speak to most engineers and producers and they'll all have stories about editing multitrack tapes.

Take producer Mike Thorne for example: 'I like to edit the multitrack tape so I can change the structure, rather than leave it to editing-the stereo mix. You can make copies of the multitrack and then edit it so you can hear the song in a coherent form.'

Thorne, who is a big fan of digital techniques when it comes to noise making (he has a full Synclavier system), becomes a little less enthusiastic about digital tape recording.

'I mastered digitally until recently when I got so tired of the cost and trouble of editing with the Sony system and the Mitsubishi two-track and its razor blade editing which is unreliable, that I've gone back to half-inch tape for mastering for an interim period while I get the Synclavier direct-to-disc system working.

'Then I can dream of leaving digital tape machines behind, thank you very much. I'll be doing safety copies on my F1 and probably half-inch, so I'll edit on the direct-to-disc and when it's done I'll pour out on to a Sony 1630 which is a very nice sounding machine, but it's so cumbersome.'

How about multitrack digital tape recording then?

'All the digital tape machines are a compromise and I wouldn't want to go to digital multitrack; it's bad enough losing a digital stereo master through some problem of lining up or whatever, but lose a digital master? No way! I've heard too many horror stories about incompatibility between different studios' multitrack set-ups, so I'm not prepared to record multitrack digital.

'Anyway, Studer 800s sound wonderful to me, and other reliable ears tell me that the new Dolby SR sounds very good, because with that you have the attributes of analogue tape which is like an old warhorse battleship. Analogue tape is very tough.'

Since Thorne has a penchant for editing the multitrack, especially when it comes to a 12-inch mix, how does he view the prospect of doing that with a digital machine?

'You'll never catch me editing a digital multitrack. People say you can, but what happens if it goes wrong? What would you tell the artists? Do you tell them that in the interest of greater sounds you've just lost the entire track and so we'll have to spend another four days re-doing it?'

Obviously nobody would like to be in that situation. Thousands of pounds spent on recording an artist's latest offering and... whoops, it's all gone. It can happen, although understandably not too many in the industry are keen to talk at length about that sort of problem and the time it wastes.

But Robin Millar, who is a big fan of digital recording, but rents rather than owns a digital multitrack notes: 'When a machine does go down, the effects are catastrophic because you end up with a ruined master tape.'

A sobering thought indeed, although Sarm West's Simon Franglen comments that although ZTT work exclusively on Sony 3224 machines, they've never had the machine scrunch a tape. But many are still not impressed with reliability, and without meaning to paint too gloomy a picture, the thing is...

'With digital multitrack,' says Paul Ward of Great Linford Manor, who took delivery of the first Studer A820 in the world and who also has a Mitsubishi X-850, 'you can't unpick an edit. If you try you just destroy the tape because it's so thin. So if you want to edit you have to hire another machine to make a safety copy, which wastes time.'

Marquee's Larry Bartlett, on digital editing: 'People have said that edits on digital can drop out after a few plays, so that sort of comment is worrying. But the other thing that bothers me is that if you do record digitally and you do have to edit, it means that you have to get in another digital multi track so you can make the safety copy. Now I don't mind that because the studio is still making money, but you have to waste the client's time and money in hiring a second machine and another reel of tape, I don't like it and obviously the client doesn't.'

With the cost of digital also being a major barrier towards its wider use, money in extra recording budgets is bad news for the recording artist.

Says Bartlett: 'I was speaking to an A&R guy who is responsible for setting the budgets, and he was saying that when bands come to him and they want to record digitally, he shows them in black and white how many more records they have to sell in order to cover the extra recording costs. The bands get quite worried when they see it in terms of album sales and money.'

Tape and financial nasties aside, how about the sound of your beloved analogue old faithful, the sound that many love and favour for the modulation and pleasant harmonic distortion it induces when required, yet which can be controlled to a large extent. Great Linford Manor know about this, with their sparkly new A820, but why did they go for digital and analogue machines?

'Well you can't commit yourself to just one or the other because the demand varies so much,' says Paul Ward. 'People are still worried about the reliability of digital, so often clients like to record a safety copy on analogue when they're working digitally. Also we've had some clients who want to record certain things on the digital and some things on the analogue machines, which works very well.'

Something the Langer and Winstanley team have been doing with the recording of the new Tears for Fears album at Westside studios, apparently with very good results, is to put drums on the analogue and the squeaky clean sequences on the digital.

Some people say they can hear the cut-off filters, which are inherent in digital recording, producing a hard harsh sound.

'There's a major problem with digital in that it hardens everything up,' says Franglen. 'The way the digital filters work is that they add harmonics on the top which makes the sound a lot harder and brittle. The SSL is a hard-sounding desk, and if you use a 16-bit sampler and put it through an SSL, on to (Sony) digital tape, you have to be very careful with the quality of sound.

'Digital also tends to get thin. It gets thinner as you go on, so when it comes to mastering you never quite get the guts that you get with analogue tape. It means that you have to be very careful.'

But then, as Nile Rodgers points out, he's never heard a kid in a record shop say to the assistant behind the counter that he's not going to buy the new record which has been recorded digitally because he can hear the filters cutting off at 20K!

Analogue tape machines and the stuff that goes on them, as Thorne notes, are very tough, taking more abuse every day and every session than their digital counterparts can handle — such as varispeed for example. Everybody has had to varispeed a multitrack at one time or another, to tune that creaky old honky tonk to the tape, or the backing vocalist who can't quite reach that high note in the chorus, or to achieve silly effects.

Can you do that with digital? No. How about archiving of tape: could a studio currently using a digital machine say that in all honesty the machine will still be there in ten years time to replay or re-master a track that's suddenly proved to be very popular again? I'm sure there will be digital multitracks around in ten years, but we've got no guarantee that the format(s) will be the same, or how well the very thin, accident prone digital tape will have stood a long rest in a dark tape store. Will those edits still be stuck together?

Also, because the machines are so new in terms of technology, they lack the professional reliability of a proven standard and format, increasing the risk of downtime. That together with the increased likelihood of tapeless recording formats being here sooner than was thought possible, digital-tape recording could be rendered obsolete.

FWO Bauch are obviously hoping everybody will buy an analogue multitrack, preferably the new Studer A820 which is proving to be very popular in the short term it has been available. According to Mike Cooper of Bauch: 'More people are buying them with Dolby SR than without.' That can be attributed to the fact that with Dolby SR, and a machine of tank-like build, you got very good recording quality, claimed to be equal to that of the current professional standard of the available 16-bit systems, yet giving all the attributes of a proven recording standard and storage medium.

But, before we move off into the realms of daydreaming and take the ostrich approach too far, you actually don't find too many people nowadays who will dispute that digital recording does in fact sound very good. I love it, although like many I don't trust it where editing and compatibility are concerned. And, like most in the industry I've had problems with tracking rates where stereo masters have been recorded on to F1 or similar, mainly due to the fact that digital stereo recording is a domestic format that's been adapted to meet professional demands and needs, sometimes with success, a lot of the time without.

The other main point, as Mike Thorne notes, is that editing digitally, on multitrack or stereo masters, is currently a right royal pain, proving to be too cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive, and until we can edit and/or piece together a track using similar techniques to word processing, taking the current techniques available on the Synclavier system a step or two further, then I for one will stick to analogue multi tracks.

When there is one universally accepted digital recording format (be it tape or some form of hard/optical disc storage), and when the engineer can edit and chop up the track giving the same results that are easily achieved with analogue machines, be it a rock 'n' roll method or digital previewing, then, and only then, will the industry as a whole welcome digital with open arms.

If the price drops then that's even better news of course, but in the meantime don't let an over-eager, commission-hungry salesman tell you any different. Despite some dubious 'two for the price of one' deals going on, sitting on the fence has never been such a good idea for the harassed studio manager.