This is becoming like one of those extreme issues like "Are you Pro-Choice?". If you own a studio and you have made the undeniably expensive investment into outfitting your studio with an analog mixer and processors that can, in your opinion, deliver better sound quality than plug-ins, then you are truly operating on a dissident plane of creative existence. There are maybe a few old studios kicking around with bullshit analog gear picking up whatever gig they can, but from my vantage point, a person in this age that builds a studio from scratch with mostly analog components is making a really revolutionary decision. Having worked for a year in a studio run by a wonderful man (Kent Gibson) who primarily did documentary film mixing but also got me into forensic audio, I can see where in many applications an analog studio would be completely impractical (Kent's studio is all-Pro Tools). That being the case, for studios willing to sacrifice automation and total recall and also spend a shitload more money on actual hardware and take up WAY more physical space, the results can surpass the wildest dreams of any person who gives a fuck about sound.
There is a crisis going on and in my personal opinion, which I have stated before (just as any person can admit to having an ideological/religious standpoint), my personal viewpoint on it is strongly shaped by my affection for post-modernist theory, is that the commercial culture we are presently living in is gravely affecting a psychological condition whose outcome is basically unique to this era, where the entire experience of "reality" from the physical world is being violently eroded. When I say "reality" I am referring to the world we experience that is defined by perception of and actualization of human intention. The technology currently being used to create the communication media which contributes so much to our self-perception is destroying our notion of ourselves as "natural" beings. I am not making this shit up. This is actually happening RIGHT NOW. When human intention becomes completely severed from media (i.e. print/electronic) communication, I think society will shift into a different paradigm. One aspect of the shift that is already happening that I am personally seeing is human alienation (typically being the outcome of irreconcilable differences of diametrically opposite intentions) ceasing to be the necessary reason for powerful emotions to erupt. THIS is affecting songwriting as I write this.
I'm getting tired because I worked hard today, but my basic hypothesis of this post is that human beings have an innate understanding of physical media vs. virtual media, and Fletcher saying his teenage daughter and her friends were now into vinyl is a vindication of this. I certainly prefer good vinyl pressings of a record played on my stereo over any other format. The problem with the word "fidelity" is that the entire language that got created to describe it was based on the reality of analog technology. I barely know words to describe fidelity problems unique to digital audio and I am actually trying to learn those words. My point is that in the near future, if not right now, the average music listener will not refer to a "good" i.e. "high fidelity" recording as one that has no self-noise or distortion or has good high frequency content, but that this audience will define "fidelity" by whether or not they believe the sound recording has any relationship to physical experience. "Fidelity"= "Do I believe it?" Because for me, the shit I hear on the radio now, I don't believe for one second that those sounds were largely created by human beings, which makes those sounds meaningless to me.
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