I been thinking.
My 25-year old son ( who is an excellent guitarist and a creative soul) has been composing stuff on Ableton lately. I've been learning. Firstly: He has a pair of PreSonus HD7s as his monitoring phones and they are brilliant. I've had a bunch of Sennheisers and these are VERY like my originals - very true and very flat.
Second: I have had an insight deposited on me like a bird-turd regarding transient elements in sound. In the absence of any facts whatsoever, here is the hypothesis.
1) Any wave front (and I have looked at a few) has a host of transient fragments and artifacts around it. Even a sine-wave generated by a machine will, by the time it hits your ear, have a variety of other bits and pieces on it. By virtue of the elastic medium (air), the environment it is in (furniture, ear-lobes) and the physics of signal decay, it is not a pure compression wave.
2) These complex bits and pieces get collected by your external ear, the meat hanging off your face, the bones in your head and so on, and funneled down through malleus incus and stapes to your auditory receptors in all their modified complexity. Just think of the way your voice sounds as you speak, or sounds when you hear a recording of yourself - completely different.
3) A microphone on the other hand collects sound comparatively cleanly. I've seen a microphone collect a sine wave as a sine wave.
4) so when you have a clean recording, properly positioned and all, and the result digitized, what you have sounds clinical. Those complexities and subtle transients are not there.
5)Back to the kid and his recordings. He has shown me that when for example a kick needs to be used in a piece, just the plain form sounds terrible. What they do is overlay a number of takes of a kick to give it more richness and texture. So even though the overall form is very similar, when you look at the magnified form there are a number of threads overlaying and intertwining with each other to provide the fullness that your ear would normally hear from a live kick-drum. If anyone is interested I have a sample of this in a .png. there are also timing differences attached to the various harmonics dues to their decay characteristics in (amongst others) human tissue.
So what has this to do with vinyl and valves?
The hypothesis is that the inaccurate needle and valves introduce their own transients and inaudible artifacts into the wave, which gives the music warmth and character.
Obviously the purists will say that this is distortion (which is true) but who listens to a pure sine-wave anyway?
What we are getting is a version of the subtle character that the music may have had in the first place.
Just go and listen to a live piano, followed by a digital recording, followed by an analogue recording.
References and bibliography available on request.
