I had a blast attending the 2020 Florida Audio Expo in Tampa. Sometimes you don’t truly appreciate the thing you had until you’ve had to live with the newer better thing that may not actually be better…Įnter the Doshi Audio EVO Tape Head Preamplifier Vinyl records came back, followed by an interest in analog tape by some isolated corners of the recording community AND amongst audiophiles. But that’s a different discussion/argument. Especially when using top-shelf converters. Even as the seduction of noiseless and shockingly linear recording quality remained, a lot of us started to hear something subtle yet quite off putting about this new digital world.ĭigital got better (in no small part due to the protests and urging of many in the audiophile community), analog tape virtually disappeared and here we are.įor the record, although lacking a certain je ne sais quoi of analog tape, I feel that the current version of ProTools has evolved to be as sonically transparent as it ever needs to be.
I should also remark that the earliest digital systems using tape, although not as good as current computer-based DAW systems, sounded FAR better than the first 10 years of Avid (initially DigiDesign) ProTools which very rapidly became the overwhelming industry-standard, shitty sounding or not. The pre-playback analog reference of looping through just the analog tape deck’s input is no longer there, so it took a minute for some of us to realize something was rotten in digital Denmark. This is important to realize: i n a recording studio scenario, it’s not common or sometimes even possible to hear the feed to the recording machine prior to looping through the input of said machine, so in a digital setup, you are always listening through the analog to digital conversion and then back to analog. No wonder some people went to the trouble of recording direct to a stereo tape deck or even direct to a cutting lathe! So it was no accident that when the first digital recording systems appeared on the scene, us engineers were by and large ecstatic over the initial sense of playback sounding exactly like input. What happened when you made a copy? More of the same. Those were the things I heard in varying degrees depending on the model of machine, type of tape, speed, and chosen record level calibration.
When all were gathered in the control room, I hit play. I mashed the talkback button and asked the band to come in and hear the take. I hit stop, then the rewind button on the MCI JH-110 2” 24 track machine. Sitting behind an enormous API console as I peered through the glass to watch the musicians in the tracking room, I heard the last bit of decay from the final chord and cymbal crash fade to silence. This latest version, labeled the EVO series, has some improvements over the previous Tape Head Preamplifier 3.0 series, but permit me to reminisce a bit first…Ī Long Time Ago In A Recording Studio Far, Far Away I had a fantastic time putting the most excellent Doshi Audio Tape Head Preamplifier through its paces.