OLD SCHOOL AUDIO: Analog vs. Digital...

I have been hired to be the sound mixer on a 35mm short filming on April 10th & 11th. The director specifically requested that I record sound on the Nagra. The unit is pictured above, as well as in the blog title (though that is an antique model). For those of you unfamiliar with this piece of equipment, it is a reel-to-reel 1/4" tape recorder of extremely high quality. For many, many years it was the industry standard for capturing sound for motion pictures. It is still occasionally used as a prop in movies when the bad guy is "caught on tape," even though surveillance has long ago switched to digital tapping.

Despite continuing to offer extremely high quality audio, it has largely been replaced by digital for several reasons. For one, audio had to be transferred in real-time, and by design could only carry one stereo soundtrack. If the mixer delivered a bad mix, that's all there was to it. Newer digital models allow us to record the mix, plus additional tracks of audio isolated from the main mix. These are called ISO tracks, or stems. On top of that, the audio is CD quality, non-destructive, and can be dragged-and-dropped in minutes; ready-to-edit. The demise of Nagra was remarkably swift, indeed!

Still, there have always been a few audiophiles who have insisted that analog audio is better than digital audio; and this director wanted to be convinced. So we met at his place in Echo Park, right by Dodger Stadium, and headed into the woods with an analog mixer, the Nagra, and my digital Fostex recorder to do a test.

Now, I haven't ran a Nagra in years, not since I used one to capture audio for the Pansy Division documentary. In that case, the tape speed was somehow compromised, and it ended up taking six weeks just to sync sound to picture. So I vowed I was done with analog, but I still owned a unit that was sitting in my closet. Today, it came out of retirement. After a few moments, I remembered how to thread the machine and roll sound without getting it to play through the built-in loudspeaker.

We listened to the digital machine first. It was recorded a little hot (my fault), so there was some harmonic distortion. Basically, it was too hot. But the Nagra, which is known to be generally overload proof, held up fine and delivered perfect audio. When we ran a second take, the audio was much improved on the digital model, but the director still thought the audio on the tape sounded better.

So we made a compromise. I asked him to rent a big sound package with a better digital model, and I would send a feed to the Nagra and "print-to-tape." This way he could still have both. In the end, I think he will take the digital audio when he realizes how difficult it will be to transfer the audio to a media he can use (this is called an Analog to Digital Conversion, or A>D

conversion). But he's old school, so who knows. It was cool to break my old Nagra out in any case, and I'm looking forward to recording on it again. It's been a long time.