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80's 70's
- Thread starter icarus88
- Start date
Depends what you mean.
Dolby NR was around in the 70's.
Well isolated, purpose built studios, professionally trained recording engineers, judicious use of quality filters, and gates etc. etc.
Dolby NR was around in the 70's.
Well isolated, purpose built studios, professionally trained recording engineers, judicious use of quality filters, and gates etc. etc.
Nobody had cell phones, for one thing. That wasn't a problem to solve.
Solid-state audio equipment had been around for 20 years by the 80s and was increasingly favored because it was cheaper to buy, less demanding of maintenance, more compact and often ran cooler.
Specific noises (like 50 or 60 Hz AC hum) could be removed with a notch filter, if necessary.
Pro studios were about the only place to do recording -- home multitracking was expensive and unwieldy (required a lot more equipment and engineering knowledge) before the advent of the Tascam Portastudio -- so musicians did their recording by renting time in spaces that could be purpose-built for silence because they made the owners money.
Solid-state audio equipment had been around for 20 years by the 80s and was increasingly favored because it was cheaper to buy, less demanding of maintenance, more compact and often ran cooler.
Specific noises (like 50 or 60 Hz AC hum) could be removed with a notch filter, if necessary.
Pro studios were about the only place to do recording -- home multitracking was expensive and unwieldy (required a lot more equipment and engineering knowledge) before the advent of the Tascam Portastudio -- so musicians did their recording by renting time in spaces that could be purpose-built for silence because they made the owners money.
clean power and proper studio design to avoid 60 cycle hum being induced into audio cables.
Do you mean “they” were using tube based recording equipment? Or that tube guitar and bass amplifiers were being recorded? That continues to this day; tube recording related gear was pretty much phased out(if not entirely)by the beginning of the 70’s. The earliest digital recording started at the tail end of the 70’s, and the outboard gear was already creeping in. As others have mentioned, Dolby NR was in use in the 70’s, and I certainly don’t consider 80’s recording gear/techniques to be that crude. Where are you getting these impressions from?
There was only about a dozen years from the invention of the MOSFET type transistor in the late 50s and its near-universal replacement of tube-based electronics. The development of mass-producible integrated circuits in the same timeframe led to circuit miniaturization and things like amplifiers on a chip, for things like effects boxes, massive multichannel mixing boards (in the late 1960s, 8 channels was considered a lot; ten years later the big studios had 64 channel boards), and "active" preamps in guitars and basses.
There was a time from the mid 70s through the mid 90s when tube amps could be had for pennies, they were just unloved because solid state amps were so much more efficient and louder. Only guitarists (and some ultra-hi-fi home stereo guys) were still seriously holding on to tube amps because they're pretty tightly bound to traditions (and also, basically, guitars don't need crazy amounts of power to hurt your ears). It wasn't until the early 2000s that tubed anything started becoming collectible and people began backfilling justifications for selling them at premium prices.
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One thing that might be confusing is that, to this day, there has been a cork sniffing cult of home hi-fi enthusiasts that embrace ultra high-end(and excruciatingly high-priced)tube based amplifiers for their playback systems…
McIntosh MC1502 Vacuum Tube Amplifier
The MC1502 Vacuum Tube Amplifier is a stereo amplifier designed for home audio and home music systems that produces 150 Watts per channel.
Also, here’s the story on the first digitally recorded album in the “popular music” realm…
Bop Till You Drop - Wikipedia
On the other hand, here’s these opinions…
www.studios301.de
That place is essentially the Abbey Road of Australia, located in Sydney, and I had the privilege to observe it as a guest in 2011…
Our History
There is a small number of niche market specifically tube-based recording studios in the world; I had heard of one in San Francisco a few years ago, didn’t know the name, but here’s one in Southern California, south of L.A.….
tubetownstudios.com
The electron tube in the recording studio
Regardless of whether it is spoken factually, sung enthusiastically or performed in a virtuoso manner on instruments, every reproduction of sound events requires a recording or its preservation beforehand. For a long time, it was considered a dream of mankind to capture acoustic perceptions to...
www.studios301.de
Our History
There is a small number of niche market specifically tube-based recording studios in the world; I had heard of one in San Francisco a few years ago, didn’t know the name, but here’s one in Southern California, south of L.A.….
About – TubeTown Recording Studios | Orange County | San Clemente, California
tubetownstudios.com
There are several things to keep in mind:
A well maintained tube amp can be whisper-quiet (I'm talking about noise, not volume). In the '70s and '80s the tube amps being used weren't all that old yet and, if they were being used in studios, somebody was maintaining them regularly to keep them running well and running quietly.
Studio wiring is fussy and meticulous. Wiring the patch panels (and the AC power) in recording studios is specialized work that is typically left to professionals in commercial studios. In semi-pro, DIY studios that were successful at the time the owners had to bone up on their electrical theory and do the work themselves but whether it was done by a pro or a small-time owner/operator the final product had the be carefully implemented. Lots of attention had to be paid to circuit isolation, shielding and grounding. In the commercial and semi-pro studios I worked in during the '80s, the wiring was never a source of noise.
Equipment manufacturers who build equipment for studio work spend a LOT of time and effort making their gear quiet. That was just as true in the 1950s as it is now. Regardless of whether the circuit is using tubes or transistors, there are ways to design quiet devices and engineers have always gone with the quietest gear their budgets would allow. Almost all new gear in the '80s was solid state and some was quieter than others - it depended entirely on price. I also saw plenty of leftover tube gear that was still in use and still quiet. Some of it was pushing 25 years old at that point.
Lastly, there was less crap in the atmosphere. Cell phones, satellites, wi-fi, bluetooth, microwaves... there's a lot more electrical interference around now than there was then. That doesn't mean there was nothing to worry about then, of course; There was still TV, AM and FM radio, some guy down the street with a ham radio, short wave, etc... but, then as now, proper attention to studio design and shielding, specifically, mitigates almost all of that.
A well maintained tube amp can be whisper-quiet (I'm talking about noise, not volume). In the '70s and '80s the tube amps being used weren't all that old yet and, if they were being used in studios, somebody was maintaining them regularly to keep them running well and running quietly.
Studio wiring is fussy and meticulous. Wiring the patch panels (and the AC power) in recording studios is specialized work that is typically left to professionals in commercial studios. In semi-pro, DIY studios that were successful at the time the owners had to bone up on their electrical theory and do the work themselves but whether it was done by a pro or a small-time owner/operator the final product had the be carefully implemented. Lots of attention had to be paid to circuit isolation, shielding and grounding. In the commercial and semi-pro studios I worked in during the '80s, the wiring was never a source of noise.
Equipment manufacturers who build equipment for studio work spend a LOT of time and effort making their gear quiet. That was just as true in the 1950s as it is now. Regardless of whether the circuit is using tubes or transistors, there are ways to design quiet devices and engineers have always gone with the quietest gear their budgets would allow. Almost all new gear in the '80s was solid state and some was quieter than others - it depended entirely on price. I also saw plenty of leftover tube gear that was still in use and still quiet. Some of it was pushing 25 years old at that point.
Lastly, there was less crap in the atmosphere. Cell phones, satellites, wi-fi, bluetooth, microwaves... there's a lot more electrical interference around now than there was then. That doesn't mean there was nothing to worry about then, of course; There was still TV, AM and FM radio, some guy down the street with a ham radio, short wave, etc... but, then as now, proper attention to studio design and shielding, specifically, mitigates almost all of that.
