MF: An old guy like me.

SA: And when he was in college as part of his post-graduate work he was involved in digital encoding of audio for the purpose of encryption for military secrecy basically. And the telephone company basically was responsible for all of that stuff. And he understands digital audio better than just about anybody. And as a result his studio is and has remained staunchly analog. High quality analog recording sounds better, is easier to work with...

MF: You are the first person to tell me that! Most people say well digital sounds lousy but the convenience factor, the editing...

SA: Once you get to the stage where the music has been digitized and stored as files on a computer and you are sitting at the computer, yes, it's very easy to shuffle things around, but for example if you're transferring an hour and a half of music and you get to one point on the tape where there's a program peak that peaks out the digital meter you've ruined the recording, you have to start over, you have to lower the signal level of the entire program to acommodate that one peak and there's very serious degradation in the sound quality of music that's recorded at anything less than the absolute peak level on digital media. And that's why classical music enthusiasts, people who listen to music with a real wide dynamic range where a large portion of the program material is at a low volume level, those people were some of the first to recognize that hey, CD sounds like shit. And that's because if you're listening to something that's at minus 20 from a 0 dB reference on a CD, the actual resolution of the word at that level is something like 12 bits, 10 bits, something like that. At 10 or twelve bit encoding, if you listened to that next to the source itself, there's no way you would accept it. Everyone talks about how CD is a 16 bit system. Its 16 bits when you're pinning the meters. When you're not, its not 16 bit. Regardless, virtually all of the digital recording that are being done these days- the stereo masters- are being done on DAT because its convenient- its a nice size. Its a terrible format! It was invented as a replacement for the home hi-fi cassette. In that capacity it would be fine. For temporary recordings of music that exist in an archival form where you just want to listen to it on a convenient size, DAT would be a perfect choice but the American major label industry blocked DAT- which to me seems like such a psychotic move.

MF: And now look at what we have! Minidisc and DCC.

SA: Neither one of which is going to survive. Even people who own CD players will recognize that these things are marginally more convenient than CDs because you can record on them, but they sound like shit. That DAT has usurped the stereo analog recorder in the studio is really criminal. One good thing though, is that it allows people like me to buy really high quality stereo analog recorders at really low prices. (Everyone laughs).

MF: What about recording consoles?

SA: It amazes me when I see displays like this of high end audio gear, people spending five, seven, eight hundred dollars on speaker cables...

MF: Eight hundred? How about fifteen thousand! (the Kimber 88).

SA: For fifteen thousand dollars I'll record and mix five or six record albums for you how's that? Anyway, I've been to the finest recording studios in the world. I've seen how these things are put together. I've looked inside the guts of the finest recording consoles in the world and there are signal paths in every piece of home audio you listen to at home, if they were like these, you'd pull your hair out looking at this.

MF: That's why many high-end engineers try to bypass the console altogether.

SA: Recording studios are put together with some regard for audio quality, but the principle guiding factor is A: what do the clients expect to see? In other words what have they seen at other studios. B: Features clients have come to appreciate, and C: cost. If things are too expensive and too cumbersome and too weird no matter how good they may be, they will never gain wide acceptance in the studios.