Old adat songs sound great

True. May not be hifi, but my old Mackie/ADAT demos sound more 'analog' than anything done solely in the DAW since. Is it the ADAT or the Mackie mixer? I mixed to DAT, too!

donr I went back to listen: looks like it's in the raw track. Maybe he's bending the guitar neck? I'll have to ask Nate when I talk to him, we were in a band together for years and I don't remember him ever doing that.

I still have the receipt form my old boss's first blackface ADAT. He pair $3,000 bucks for it, and had to order and wait for it to arrive. 

I did my 2007 album Watching the Days Fall on ADAT. It has a bit of an analogue-ish sound, but my own recordings using Logic do sound better.

General synopsis - evidence suggests they didn’t sound nearly as terrible as everyone bitched moaned and wailed at the time.

You have to remember 99% of the ADAT /DA88 buyers fell into 2 camps that were really responsible for the shit on a stick rep.
1. Baby’s first multitrack; about 49.5% of the guys who were buying Modular Digital Multitracks from me had never recorded before, you think these guys with a handful of SM57’s a Mackie, Alesis Monitors we’re going to put out the next Srgt. Pepper?
These were guy’s learning from each other as much as mix Magazine. 1 in 20 had Room treatment!
2 Daddy’s first digital multitrack, yeah these guys had used tape, in most cases a cassette portastudio or maybe 16 track 1/2 in so a really high speed cassette, learning meter in the red = line of death vs we can push it, or the guys who didn’t know what to do with the headroom. Suddenly noise mattered and that old Studiomaster Diamond or Peavey MK4 was replaced with a quiet, but soul less Mackie.
Your typical MDM rig probably had a CAD E100 or AKG C3000 as the go to vocal Mic, later maybe a TLM103. The dynamics if any was a DBX166 at best but more likely a pair of 3630’s.
At this point a pretty basic PT TDM rig was about $12k and in about a 5 year period went from Nubus, to PCI to 24 bit. So the MDM rig looked like a bargain

30-40 years later I think a lot of people feel that way, don’t get me wrong taking cheap consumer VCRS and speeding them up was not a good idea, physically the machines were crap, but in terms of sound quality for the time they weren’t bad. I know a couple of guys who used the converters in their ADATs with PT rigs, they sounded as good as the ones who used 888’a. OK that isn’t saying much but it wasn’t until you had the Apogee AD800 and the 8 ch Lucid converter that you had mainstream quality conversion.

Yup.  This is generally true.  But analog and punchy sounding?  That is about as far away from my mind as it can get when someone says ADAT.  Don't miss em, will not care if I never see one again.   They were an OK tool at the time.  IMO, DA88's were better overall, but I don't care if I never see one of those again either.  LOL

Vintage?  No....just old.

Yeah....both sync issues and dig audio dropouts were huge.  Always a struggle.

These days I don't think young engineers even have the concept of "sync" in their vocabulary.  Back then, those were everyday battles that had to be fought and won to make any progress.  Add video and analog into the equation and BAM!  Huge issues.

There were times when I had to sync 3/4" video and MCI JH24's together via Lynx modules, then PT via their sync module, then DA-88's to the whole mess as well.  Sometimes ADATs as well.  Thanks to this thread, I will probably have sync nightmares tonight.....



PS - do you think anyone here but you and I know what black burst is and how / when / and how not to use it Eric?  

Dude even like 15 years ago in 2008 clean digital non linear processors didn’t exist and the ones that didn’t sound like ass (Waves Renaissance and Sony / Sonnox Oxford) were expensive.

Now clean hardware processors mostly don’t exist outside of a handful of new pieces that aren’t even in the top price bracket and good new digital plugs make the the old not awful ones sound like ass and old “clean” affordable processors to sound like murky pieces of shit. Most of the old clean stuff is gone. Of course we’ve lived in an era when people have wanted bandpassed garbage instead of clean for 20 years or they falsely believe that some dirty boring pos filled with junk is clean when it’s far dirtier than say better tube gear outside of the 1st or 3rd harmonic

I know about black burst in theory, as well at Lynx and the like.  Living/being such a low space on the totem pole of the entertainment 'biz' I never really had to deal with those things.  I have enough friends that I know some stories...

I was hired to work at a 2 ADAT/Mackie room in '96 that somewhat mirrored Eric's post. 166, 2 3630s, MIDIverb III, AT 4033 as out flagship condenser.  The boss got me going and I spent a lot of time but with clients and without, learning how to do the gig.  I'd pick tapes off the shelf and mix random things the boss tracked.  I'd set up mics, hit record and run out to the live room and play, then come back and listen.  I read magazines and found rec.audio.pro and THAT was where I really learned things.  There were CATS there. I think it where I first encountered Bob Olhsson.  


We made improvements, bought better things, tried to constantly make the place better. A TAC Magnum from Johnny K was the real "now we're getting somewhere" moment. I had been suspecting the Mackie wasn't as happening (thought it was fun when we added the expander and I have 48 channels sitting in front of me). We'd added a lot of compressors, then some pres, but this console was a HUGE leap.  I then used my own money and bought a 2" machine and that was another huge leap.  I really bummed me out when I had to go back to the ADATs for budget reasons.

Sure I can listen to things from the ADAT days and like them, more often it's because of the music, not the sonics.  Also (which is still often true) it's the simpler things that worked best.  4-5 musicians playing together, overdub vocals and some ear candy and make a mix, that are often the best stuff.