Rick's Articles

Sound Australasia - Volume 1 : Issue 1
The world’s greatest liar The other night we were sitting down to dinner when my friend's 12-year-old daughter interrupted the conversation with an impolite "And what do you do, mister?" Without even thinking about it, I mumbled, "Um, I make records".

That usually gets me out of trouble, but on this occasion I was in trouble. "What are records?" she says. "He means CD’s," says her father. "What's the difference?" "Records are analogue, CDs are digital. Digital means perfect sound forever..."

I don't know if you remember the first time you heard those words, but 'perfect sound forever' was the first digital lie I was ever told. It has remained one of the all-time winning lies. Some of my friends still believe it. Let's face it, when analogue gets something wrong, it lets you know straight away. These aren't lies, not real ones. Lies are all about deceit, trying to get away with something while pretending you're telling the truth.

So I've come to the conclusion that digital is the world's greatest liar. Digital's lies are so well-executed and so well-concealed that you need the patience of a polar bear and the wit of a fox to catch it out. When you finally nail the problem, the people who designed the box say, "Sorry about that. Design bug. We'll fix it in the new software".

Because digital audio is new to the planet, I can forgive some of its shortcomings. I can forgive the way it chops my sound into thousands of discrete numbers and then puts it back together again, losing imaging, warmth and definition. I can forgive the glitches and computer crashes. I can even forgive the fact that digital is impossible to say when you're drunk. What I cannot forgive is that I spend weeks every year chasing some digital error just so I don't do something bad to the sound while I'm listening to 'perfect sound forever'.

I used to work in one of Australia's biggest studios. Early in the digital game a friend of mine was making his first album, a synth/guitar thing. He asked me what the best format to mix to was, so naturally I said 'digital'. DAT, to be precise.

So he brings his mixes in on DAT, ready for mastering. I compile the album on the digital editor and dump it to a 1630. I master the way we'd been doing for years. Because it was my friend's first record and he was scared of all this technology, I made him a DAT copy as we checked the 1630 master. Everything looked perfect, including a digital CRC verification sheet. A week later he calls and says the DAT doesn't sound right. It's got small clicks, and there's less stereo. Oh yeah, and it,
sounds a little harsh. This being 1986 I politely explained that because it's digital there's nothing to worry about. The 1630 master is fine, so maybe his DAT tape is damaged. I make him another one. This time he's got the same problem, except the clicks are in different places. I tried to tell my bosses and technicians that there was a problem with digital transfers. All I got was, "This is digital, what are you talking about?". So I devised a test with a series of well-meaning tones, some music and some silence. Nothing.

Then one night I digitally transferred a dual channel mono 16kHz tone from the 1630 to the DAT and back again. Bingo! At irregular intervals the tone went slightly out of phase and sometimes clicked or glitched. When I presented my evidence to the bosses, I can tell you my future was not looking too bright at all. How dare this kid say their expensive digital gear was lying? Nobody wanted to know about a problem that had evaded their detection for years.

It turned out the DAT machine had a design fault with its word clock circuitry, and could only record properly if it was the master and the 1630 was slaved to it. But instead of spitting the dummy, it continued to pass seemingly perfect digital audio until somebody called its bluff.

Digital has told me many lies since then. If you don't think your digital multitrack, hard disk recorder, sampler, reverb, flight simulator or whatever is capable of messing up without you noticing... tune in. It's digital. It's processing massive amounts of numbers every second. Things can get complicated.

I love digital, but it can be a liar. It's like a new girlfriend. Sure, she's new and exciting, but can she be trusted? Does she replace the years of warmth and dependability you got from dating Miss Analogue? Not yet. Digital is such a jealous bitch that it and its creators won't conceive of any kind of dual existence. They resort to marketing digital as the only option. "Get digital, get it all, get it now. You need this stuff. It's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Yeah right...

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