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The original recordings of albums 1-8 cover a period of twenty years. They’re all high quality recordings professionally recorded on top quality analogue tape machines of the period.
To make the CD production master disk, the tapes have been transferred using a stand alone CD recorder and a separate very high quality analogue to digital converter system. This is as near to the original smooth warm analogue sound as I can get on CD.
Also, as I want to preserve that natural analogue sound as much as possible, no ‘enhancing’ dynamic compression techniques have been used on these CDs either. This ,as you may know, is a technical trick employed by record companies to make their releases compete for consistent loudness when say played on the radio. Apparently this constant “in your face” sound level is very good for sales. I’m not keen on it myself, I’m afraid I do prefer loud and quiet bits in my music. Compressors can be very useful tools so I’m not against their use for artistic rather than money reasons.
All the recordings here, however, do exploit the full natural dynamic range of the CD format but having said that, you will probably find they sound generally a little quieter than much of the heavily compressed popular music recordings you may have.
In the last few years computers have generally taken over from tape recorders for music recording. In fact, so much so, that analogue tape manufacturers are now finding it difficult to stay in business. The writing is finally on the wall for analogue tape! This is no doubt because 24 bit computer high resolution recording is now very good indeed and the recording tools available for the PC are fantastic compared to a few years ago. They are much cheaper too! The only thing that is missing for me is that nice warm analogue tape sound quality but that’s progress.
The ninth album and beyond are wholly computer recorded albums. There are still plenty of analogue tape sounds on them and the mixing is still often analogue but it has all been assembled and edited digitally on a PC internally to a 64bit depth. The final versions end up as 24bit files. They are reduced down to 16bit CD format only at the final master CD burn. Future albums will still use analogue tape sounds but my use of tape will slowly dwindle and everything will eventually be done digitally.
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