Is 1/4″ analog tape worth the trouble?
If I had a choice between 1/4″ analog tape and 24-bit digital at 48kHz or better, I’d probably take the digital. Heresy? Maybe, but there are fine audio cards now for a few hundred $US, that you can throw into a semi-decent computer. They’ll turn the machine into a mixdown deck as good as anything you can buy off the shelf. For most material, the warmth/air advantage of 1/4″ is not significant, in my opinion, compared to 24-bit. (1/2″ tape is another story.) Most of the limits with 24-bit have to do with the recording and mixing technique, not the sound of the medium. I’ll mention another idea, also bordering on heresy: 24-bits can pretty effectively archive the sound of an already-recorded analog tape. For example, you can’t _create_ the silky sound of 1/2″ analog tape with a 24-bit digital recorder, but if you make a flat transfer off the analog to the digital, the change in signal quality is small enough so that few could detect the difference. I don’t know why this is so, but try i
