Dark Side of The Moon - Drum Sound - Alan Parsons

So when your needle was at -4 you were really at 0db?
Or??

Thanks
-L.

Oh!

I'm not referring to consumer vs professional level. I'm referring to how your internal levels were setup when the deck was calibrated.

See on decks when you set these levels up, the 0 on the VU meter is normally going to indicate a level over what we actually call 0db.  For instance our Studer A810, when you hit -9 on the VU, that's actually 0db.  When you go to 0 you're actually at +12db.

This typically applies to all tape decks, they have their internal configurations and calibrations that are aside from the consumer vs professional aspect.  

This is why I was curious about your post where you said that you never pegged your meters, thus you claimed that you weren't hitting your deck that hot.  On average if you were approaching 0db on the needles or even in the neighborhood, you could be anywhere (depending on the formula you calibrated for, EQ curve and tape speed) from +3db to +9db over 0 once you got to the actual 0 on your meter. So when people are talking about pegging their meters, they are speaking typically of recording very very hot to tape, whereas your machine even though your needles weren't dimed you were still hitting the deck hot, definitely hotter than you'd hit digital converters. 

BTW the offer is still out there to do a pass of something of yours through Zulu while we wait for the initial run to spawn.  I've watched a bunch of your videos on youtube, must say I dig the material.  

Thanks
-L.

This is an excerpt from the video you're talking about. In it, Vig talks about the vocal doubling.

Uhh...yes please.

Wow hijacked the thread; oops. Yeah thats gotta be the video. Its been awhile.
I think what I got most from it was (and this applies to DOTTM too) there are no real rules in rock or pop or whatever genre. I think at the time I believed everything had to sound like the band did; i really like it when a band can produce that album sound live (and vice versa) but in all actuality an album can be an entirely different beast. I guess at one time or another I was a haphazard purist.
Nowadays im a professional hobbyist. Ha!

Thinking on it a little, I think zero on my meter was + 4db, but again, it's been a while.

All I can think of while watching this is Lonya / AKA Russki who kept the gear running at SMART going " Lennin? Lennin? why would anyone want to sound like Lennin?" 😄

Did you , or other engineers back then slam tape to get a compressed sound ? When would you say engineers started to slam tape as an alternative to using a hardware compressor ?

Yep. I said I don't recall anyone ever slamming tape. A little red now and then was tolerated, but that's it.

I think what constrained anything beyond +3 was the inability of the erase head to cope with anything hotter on a lot of machines still in service back then, even as Ampex 456 and AGFA 469 could handle the hotter signals. Not everybody could afford one-pass two inch tracking of basics. Or even 30 ips in lots of cases. I did have an Otari half track machine that was set up +6 for a bit, the first project that went to a duplicator convinced me that that it wasn't worth a bit of complaining on the other end about possible distortion. I hadn't forewarned them, and they called when they put up the test tones wondering what I was thinking. Funny thing, that tape ended up a national release, with those same masters. Really, there was no talk of oxide compression at all until the ADAT format became commonplace and engineers tried to figure out why things they had done a certain way for a decade suddenly sounded weak. I initially loved digital, I was an early user of the the Sony PCM F-1 with a Betamax for stereo capture, even using it to record two live-to-stereo LPs with the Coctails from Chicago. In keeping with their retro image we claimed that they were recorded on my Ampex 354 which made for a better photograph. When Akai introduced their 14 track digital multitrack that used videocassettes I did an analysis of tape costs and found that the machines ended up being basically free but I demurred out of caution. A few months later I saw a demo of the ADAT machine, looked at the MAP and decided that owning a music-oriented recording shack was likely to be a less exclusive enterprise and sold all the gear about six months before it became boat anchors in terms of value. Most of the ADAT-enabled studios ended up DAW victims, technology marches on, and you can adapt or perish. As someone who started at the dawn of the DIY recording era, I can certainly appreciate the democracy of the DAW, even as it has spelled disaster for entrepreneurial types who parlayed their knowledge of music and audio into some kind of enterprise. If the public doesn't understand that the number of people who are adept at multi-track recording hasn't really changed even as the number of people offering the service has exploded, well, the majority of recording has always been more about desire than actual need. Same as it ever was.....

Erasure only became a problem with the high output tapes like 456 of the '70s and '80s that tape machines from the '50 and '60s weren't designed for. We aligned for 185 until around 1970 and then 3 dB. higher with Scotch 206. We only pinned the needle for bass and lead vocal because our early 8 tracks had a hum problem on the two outside tracks. (Almost from the beginning we were doing 8 to 8 mix down transfers exactly like we had done 3 to 3s and the Beatles did 4 to 4s. I roll my eyes whenever people talk about recording to one 8 track because that wasn't how I ever saw it done.)

The only instrument that benefited from tape saturation for me was the piano and even then it was never pinned and recorded peaking to around -5. A very small percentage of people using tape today are recording at traditional levels and today's tape has pretty serious drop out problems if it isn't transferred right away.