Auctioneer to sell off Pink Floyd recording console

> all of those phenomena can be perfectly modelled in the box

Nope.

How you gonna model the interaction between a microphone and the preamp load it's driving, and the compressor that's driving, and the EQ it's driving, and the nonlinear summing bus that's feeding, when all of these are interacting in a live signal chain, and all entering various forms of nonlinear behavior based on the age of components, their tolerances which vary from box to box, heat, etc? It might be theoretically possible, but past a certain point, to model these devices requires modeling physics at the materials level. In point of fact most digital "simulations" of these sorts of devices are not simulations at all, but approximations that impart similar EQ, dynamics, and harmonic distortion.

I'm a dev by trade, been doing audio for decades too. I used to believe this was all modellable too. I think there's a tendency for people who are strong in digital signal processing but naive to what these devices are really doing to the signal to be overconfident in our ability to simulate them in realtime.

You can definitely achieve a reasonable facsimile! But if you want the sound of this console then you're going to have to make one or buy one.

I don't believe it's any of those things. Though, certainly the ergonomics of a traditional studio, and the equipment therein, works best for engineers who learned in those environments and using those tools. Those engineers happen to be the most experienced engineers working, so they are probably, on average, better than most younger engineers with much less experience.

However, the reason some of the classic records sound amazing today is because they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make, in a time when hundreds of thousands of dollars was a lot of money. This is reflected in the rooms where they recorded. The quality of the studio itself is every bit as important, maybe even more important, than the equipment within it.

When recording live musicians, a bad room literally cannot be overcome with good equipment. And, thus, simulating a great room with equipment is harder than simulating a great console, or a great EQ, or a great compressor. Digitally removing the room "badness" and putting in "goodness" isn't something that people have even really tried.

Records made at Abbey Road studios sounded great because the room sounded great, the microphones sounded great, the board sounded great, the EQs and compressors sounded great, and, the musicians sounded great playing through their great sounding instruments. They had everything working in their favor, and that moment of everything coming together nicely was captured by excellent engineers.

So...the reason most records don't sound as good as Dark Side of the Moon is not merely that there aren't a lot of consoles comparable to this one. You could probably find something that would be a sufficient substitute (and maybe even a laptop with a very good AD/DA could substitute for much of the equipment in a studio). But, any mediocre piece in the chain, starting with the musicians and the room they're playing in, will make a mediocre recording.

Pink Floyd, a very talented bunch of musicians and songwriters, had a massive budget, a truly inspired bunch of songs, and a lucky bunch of connections in the industry to get them the best people and the best gear all in the best studio in the world, and the result is a classic that sounds better (by some definition of "better") than 95+% of big budget records even made today. There have been similarly high quality recordings made, but it's rare...and I don't think a specific set of equipment can do it (after all, lots of other records were recorded in the very same studio and didn't sound that amazing). A lot of stuff has to come together for it to work out that way.

There's no doubt that the data and measurements would tell us that this analog gear is objectively less accurate than a laptop's worth of high-quality digital gear.

What gets overlooked, though, is that analog gear often sounds more pleasing because some kinds of distortion sound subjectively "good" to our ears.

The easiest example is electric guitars. They are full of (intentionally introduced) distortion and (when everything is set up and played well) they sound freaking awesome. We all know this, right?

We also know that most distortion sounds bad -- when your mp3 is corrupted, or when you're using the headphone output of a crappy laptop with a bunch of random noise.

So that tells us what? Some distortion sounds good, some sounds bad.

Clipping and random noise are forms of distortion that sound bad, generally, unless you're intentionally going for some kind of glitches-out sound like some artists do.

Some distortion sounds pleasing through, just like our electric guitar example. Second-order harmonic distortion (and other even-order distortion) often sounds good to us. Second order distortion introduces distortion that is exactly one octave higher and one octave lower than the fundamental frequency of the note being played. It's basically a "chorus" effect and it can be very pleasing and musical.

This is why tube amplification can be very enjoyable. Objectively, it's shit. Subjectively, it can sound nice, because most of the distortion is second-order harmonic distortion.

I don't know what kind of technology exists inside this console, but just know that accuracy is not always the highest goal of art. It's why we have paintings instead of photographs, and why movies have dramatic lighting inside of just clinically lighting everything like it was the inside of an operating room.

Or, just use your ears. Because Dark Side of the Moon sounds as good as any album you've heard in your life, and significantly better than most.

Not to be glib, but why not both? Are you a recording engineer and capable of speaking to the points he makes, or is your entire counter-argument "I don't believe that"?

That's a pretty extreme approach! It reminds me a little of my all time favourite musicians, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings - who detail their process here: http://tapeop.com/interviews/85/gillian-welch-and-dave-rawli...

One of the relevant quotes:

Q: Is everything recorded live?

G: Totally.

D: Yeah, everything is live. It is pretty much all from takes one, two or three. Very few mixes. This is the first record we've done that Stephen Marcussen [our mastering engineer] listened to and said, "Okay, Let's transfer it." We didn't compress or EQ anything. Just transferred it from a machine of his that we really like, through the nice converters and a clean signal chain.

In my more limited experience having a minimalist workflow can have benefits that stray way beyond sonic purity: it encourages discipline and allows you to concentrate on the task at hand . The minutiae of your workflow are less important than simply having one.