Noise or Aliasing issues - which one do you prefer?

This question boils down to issues in the analog world which is Noise and sometimes pleasant distortion; or the digital world with Aliasing and unpleasant distortion.

I started my days in the middle of the 80th in the analog world with tape machines and analog compressors and filters, but we were on our way into the digital era by that time and the CD player came.

1981 I was educated both in analog and digital electronics, and 1982 I wrote my first Assembler and Basic code. So, when I started to work as a studio engineer 1985 I already realized the beauty of the digital world and what that could do for us and I bought my first digital reverb from Alesis (it is still alive and working).

I hated to write down all the settings on the mixer board and the effect rack, so I was longing for the digital counterpart, and 1989 I started to use a hacked version of Cubase while one of my friends been using Steinberg 24 for quite some time - the predecessor of Cubase. I used a Steinberg device with which I recorded a sync track to the a channel on the tape machine so that I could sync the recorded audio with Cubase - a SMTPE code generator/reader.

1996 finally I could mainly move over to entirely using the digital world since Cubase came with a version which had a good function for audio recording for Windows.

No more the need of writing down setting and less noise, but another problem come into the picture - aliasing and the need of processing power.

Aliasing is the digital audio Hell which is a tricky beast which is as problematic as the noise, and sometimes distortion, in the analog world.

In the analog world you have to record the audio signal as hot as possible without peaking so that you create distortion, therefor you often recording with a compressor or/and limiter, to decrease the noise. In the digital world we really don't have that issue if done right.

In the digital world you have to decide what sample rate and bit deep you want to record at, higher sample rate and bit deep consumes more processing power and can increase the intermodulation distortion (IMD). But on the other hand a higher sample rate can benefit a larger chain of effect plugins. Due to this issue it is considerable to use channel effects like Waves' Omni Channel, or any of Softube's channel strips etc.

To much mambo-jumbo? Take a look at this video, and you HAVE TO look at the entire video to see the final conclusion: https://youtu.be/-jCwIsT0X8M

Been knowing those issues for quite some time I still going for an entirely digital world as far as possible, but it is sometimes considerable to use analog equipment. Still I find a tube based guitar amp to sound better than any amp sim, but I prefer to use an amp sim - it makes life easier.

5 comments