Old adat songs sound great

Any clips to share?
Chris

Yeah, I think a lot of it is we once again had to work harder at the basics. Even if we had a DAW, it didn’t have the power to use as much processing to overcome bad tracking decisions, so we had to still put in the work.

Yeah I remember one of the guys at Alesis complaining that even after it went multi platinum she never returned a loaned ADAT.

Ha! So true! But even the ADAT seemed so expensive at the time for one deck at $2,500-ish + tax from Sweetwater.

Yeah there is so much Folk lore about this album. From the public and private stories the Narrative I have pieced together is that the ADAT rig at her house was probably mostly a writing rig, Ballard probably convinced Alesis and Mackie to loan her gear and they ran with the home recording Myth. I know a bunch of it was done at Glenn’s home studio, but I also was sitting next to a guy from Westlake Audio as Alesis was spinning their take who kept whispering about all the time they had spent at Westlake Studios.
Since at the time when they started writing she was 19 I can see Ballard setting her up with a writing rig at home to keep the wolves at bay.

And I remember selling a bunch and noticing my commission wasn’t that big!

Yeah, I'm not buying this one.. ADAT was just a cheap digital format (relative for the day), I've heard too many stunning analog style classical recordings or live band recordings to ever believe ADAT had anything to do with it (or that it's remotely better). Issue with modern direct to DAW w/ plugins is you can edit it to oblivion, sometimes less really is more and cliche's are cliche's for a reason.

Go for it, the issue for me is whenever I've heard or used ADAT it came off an expensive console with great tracking rooms and by modern standards it's quite an unfair comparison. We're not talking plugins vs. hardware here, it's a matter of whatever they wanted they bought and it usually was hardware.

I looked for a used second machine, didn’t see any until ‘95 then that was $1800. Yep on the XT20’s! Huge drop from the start.

I often go back to my earliest recordings and remark at how decent stuff I recorded sounded back then before I let years of following the advice of folks online destroy my instinct for it.. lol.

Anyway, what I think happens is nothing to do with the format and everything to do with expectations.

Today, we just expect years of experience and gear upgrades to have made such a huge difference that our expectations are completely skewed. We expect that everything old and done on "bad" gear to sound.. well, bad!

but the truth is that it doesn't. It never did. The marketing has worked in promoting every new iteration of something as "lightyears ahead" of whatever came before and we eventually lose the comparison in our minds as we progress through the "newest and best" of whatever gadget it is.

But the gear from yesteryear only sounds like it has some kind of magic because your expectation of it was so low through years of careful marketing manipulation and the desire for you money to have been spent wisely.