Remember when CD's first came out, and the had that little AAD or DDD code up in the corner, to tell you which steps in the process had been done in the Analog domain, and which had been done in the Digital. Given the current crop of recorded onto hard drive, mixed, or at least processed in the box, and shipped to a computer controlled pressing plant with digital lathes releases of music, I think it only fair if we reinstate the information so that any vinyl afficionado knows exactly what they are getting.
For the most part, something like a DVD-Audio disk would give a more accurate representation of the master recording, than a vinyl disk will, you can scan a DVD-Audio disk onto hard drive, and come back with an exact duplicate, bit for bit, with the original mastered recording, whereas a vinyl disk will only ever achieve a rough approximation of what was heard (a la an MP3 file) in this sense it is a lossy format, it cannot accurately reproduce the master recording, and there is no magic that makes the analog recording on the disk better than the digital file it was created from.
I have a friend that runs a small independent label, and he does record pure analog recordings, he picked the only pressing plant he could find that not only will accept analog master tapes, but swears to put them to the lathe in an analog fashion, and not digitize them. This would be the only case I can see where vinyl can be argued to be the more accurate format.
I know the whole analog / digital debate is a hoary old chestnut, but I just needed to get this bit of it off my chest.
...and I may have missed it, as I came late to Tape-Op, at issue 40, but I would love to see an interview with On-U Sound's Adrian Sherwood, seeing as you are doing a lot more UK interviews now. Keep up the good work, etc. etc.
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