When I bought a Royer R-121, I added to my arsenal what is widely regarded as the best microphone for electric guitar of all-time.

When I acquired my API preamps, I gained the coloration found on an endless number of classic recordings from the past fourty years.

When I assembled my new PC, an Intel i7-950 with 12GB of DDR3, I was no longer limited by my computer and the sky became the limit.

But one thing still nagged me. With all of my high-tech gear, I was missing one integral piece of a professional studio: tape. The harshness of digital recording is like a shotgun to my eardrum and no matter what I do, that cold shrillness of something sounding through my monitors the way it actually sounds when standing in front of it makes my blood boil.

So I fixed it.

I would like to introduce you to a piece of classic gear. An item that has been owned by countless classic producers, an item integral to the history of recording. Friends, I would like to introduce…

The Tascam Porta02. No balanced connections, no phantom power, no bullshit. Just right.

OK, so with that out of the way, I’d like to say how much the whole attitude of “tape, good; digital, baaaad” bugs me. I can’t begin to tell you how often I hear or read someone remark, “Oh yeah, we’re recording here. He uses all analog shit, man. It’s fuckin’ great,” or, “You record digitally? That’s cool but tape is just so much better.” Seriously, shut up. Just shut up.

The notion of tape being better than digital recording comes from a few places, as far as I’m concerned. Here they are.

One, home recording has fucked up recorded music. While it is a wonderful equalizer and allows young bands and individuals the ability to record and share their music, the accessibility of cheap gear and guys who setup their Digi 002 and suddenly have a studio causes a real problem for guys who invest thousands in their setup. Well, maybe not a “real” problem but it is an inconvenience and frustrating when good bands sell themselves short by going with cheap instead of good… but that’s another story. Anyway, the point is that because of the cheap AD converters you find floating around, my generation thinks that is what a digital recording sounds like, doesn’t really consider the whole AD/DA process, and don’t stop to think that just as there are different grades of guitars and drums and cars and phones and dogs and fucking people there must be different grades of analog-to-digital converters and tape machines. Those of us who come from the DIY scenes and grew up listening to noisy, shitty recordings discovered vinyl and realized that it made all that noise at the top and bottom feel much softer, so it’s easy to follow the logic that says that if vinyl is better than CD (which also pisses me off) than tape must be better than digital.

Second, tape has this coolness to it that it gets just by being old, slow, and cumbersome. It’s also expensive, which helps too. It’s also becoming more of a rarity. Bonus! We want what nobody else is doing.

Third, tape really CAN sound better. In some cases. Allow me to educate, studio-shopping friends.

First of all, in the right circumstances, tape is awesome. All tape colors sound in a unique way. It also does interesting things to dynamics. If you hit tape hard enough, you get natural compression that is incredible. You get warmth and punch, shrill highs are softened, lows fill out. There is a vibrancy and fullness that is instantly recognizable as coming from tape that is impossible to get in a PC unless you are using the UAD Studer plug-in (which is debatable) or the Nebula R2R library combined with the same developer’s TB+ and VTM-M2 which, by nearly all accounts, does a flawless job of making signals passed through it sound identical to what it would be if sent through the actual hardware. It is amazing. But that’s not my point here.

What is my point is that like anything else, there are different grades of tape and there are different grades of tape machines. What many musicians and uneducated studio engineers do not seem to realize is that a cheap tape machine, while having a sound that might be worth using in some cases, is going to sound cheap and shitty. If you don’t keep it maintained — if you don’t keep ANY tape machine maintained — it will sound worse and worse over time. Additionally, the actual tape you use is going to affect the end result. I’m no expert on tape machines or tape brands, but I can tell you that if you are looking for a place to record and you really want to use tape, you need to find out the model of the machine, what kind of maintenance is performed, and what kind of tape they’re using. Research the gear, get samples of their previous work, and listen carefully to it. After that, find out what they do after it’s on the tape and if they mix 100% in the analog world or if it at any time goes into a computer. Because if it goes into a computer…

…digital recording is not the same everywhere you go. The analog-to-digital process is not universal and your $500 converter is not going to sound the same as your Lynx Aurora. Same mics, same cables, same preamps, same room, same instruments, and your recordings will sound different. It might be subtle, the kind of thing you don’t notice when soloing tracks, but it’s usually easiest to pick out in the stereo image and extreme high and low frequencies and something that is noticeable when listening to a full band recorded using cheap AD compared to expensive AD. Cheap conversion is one of the hallmarks of a hastily-assembled studio. The guy with the killer mics into the OK preamps using shitty cables into low-end converters and then coming back through entry-level monitors: that’s someone who needs to read more. But he is everywhere.

So what I see happening way more often than I’d like is this: good band is attracted by a studio’s analog gear. They go and record there and the guy is using a tape machine but… it sounds kind of crappy, kind of… weird. But because the band has been telling themselves and been told that old = good and vintage = cool and lo-fi = awesome, they’re all afraid to say, “Hey, wait, my $2000 guitar played through my $2000 head into my $1200 cab doesn’t sound the way it does when you’re standing in front of it.” The Emperor’s New Clothes: audio engineering edition. Then, to make matters worse, the studio just uses the tape for that “vintage warmth” and then they dump it into their PC to edit it by sending it through their Digi 002. Hell, even if they use a killer Studer tape machine, as soon as they send it through those cheap preamps and that cheap converter, their quality immediately decreases. But if anyone notices, they don’t want to say anything.

Like tape machines, you can spent tens of thousands of dollars on AD conversion. The catchall “digital recording” is unfair to those who invest in Mytek gear, just as calling my Tascam Porta 02 “vintage tape” is an insult to those whose carefully maintained Otari machines are the pride of their studios. My point here: know what you’re looking for, know what you’re getting. The idea that digital recording is inherently cold and brittle is just as absurd as the idea that all tape is warm and punchy.