I wish there was a low bit rate sound card with a special character

[marf]

And you could use it on new systems. An on board analog VCA/ Filter wouldn't hurt 

[pcock]

why would that be different to putting bit reduction on your master?

[TubularCorporation]

My friend who used to work at Akai during the MPC Renaissance dev cycle went off at length a few times about what a lost opportunity it was to tie the controller to proprietary software largely because IT ACTUALLY DID THIS.

 

The interface could be set to emulate (in hardware) the converters of a few different early Akai samplers and apparently it did a really good job, but you could only use it if you were willing to use the MPC Renaissance software, which I've never tried but I haven't heard much positive about (the people I know who worked there considered the release version not even a beta but outright unfinished, and it was still like that over a year later when the last person I knew there quit).  The hardware, though, is apparently a really nice pad controller with a USB audio interface specifically designed with early, low arbitrate hardware in mind, so if you could use it with Ableton or as an audiointrface for your DAW it would allegedly be really nice.

 

 

There are actually companies cloning early sound cards for the retrocomputing market right now, but they're exact or nearly exact clones, so you need a period computer to actually use them.

[marf]

why would that be different to putting bit reduction on your master?

 

 

It just would be. The dacs have character. I like old 70's digital music

[ignatius]

 

why would that be different to putting bit reduction on your master?

 

 

It just would be. The dacs have character. I like old 70's digital music

 

 

 

what particular digital model of anything from the 70s do you like?  what digital things were even around then and in use in a big way in studios?

 

edit: i thinkt here were a couple digital delays and things like eventide H910. but i think the mojo from the 70s was mostly down to analog consoles and analog tape machines no? 

[thawkins]

I don't think anyone in the 70s even had a concept of a sound card in a computer or using it in a recording studio. That stuff came somewhere in the 80s when personal computers started taking off and the economies of scale made it possible to even consider having a PC in a recording studio. From my impression you might have had digital synths or sequencers in the 70s but they were still recorded using analog equipment, so not sure if there even was something that could be called "70's digital music".

[ignatius]

I don't think anyone in the 70s even had a concept of a sound card in a computer or using it in a recording studio. That stuff came somewhere in the 80s when personal computers started taking off and the economies of scale made it possible to even consider having a PC in a recording studio. From my impression you might have had digital synths or sequencers in the 70s but they were still recorded using analog equipment, so not sure if there even was something that could be called "70's digital music".

 

 

there's early computer music etc but i don't think any of that stuff was common enough to be a thing people are nostalgic for when it comes to the DACs in various things.. especially since all of it was recorded to tape like everything else. 

 

digital recording didnt really become a thing until much later. even in the 90s mostly everything was recorded to tape because digital was so new (and expensive) and pretty shitty and all the recording engineers hated it and didn't know what to do w/it. 

 

as for individual bits of studio kit there's lot's of early digital things.. by early i mean 80s 90s that has some mojo in the converters and analog front/back ends. 

 

some synths are well done like even the yamaha DX7 had a nice sound to it becuase the converters weren't really able to do 44.1 and rolled off via iltering at 32khz or something like that.. 

 

edit:  but liking 70s digital music might up for most IDM status the next voting session

[drukqs]

Not exactly the same thing but I used to record stuff off of my iPhone directly into audacity using my computer's mic port. It would always leave these really interesting artifacts and noises. I love it, I think I will start doing it again but try to accentuate the noise in some way. It's almost like a next-gen burial vinyl crackle but with all kinds of subtle bleeps madness and sounds reminiscent of dial-up. Very quiet and almost indistinguishable from white noise though. I bet it would be good run through a high quality noise remover plugin to really get those weird noises.

[TubularCorporation]

Hawkwind's "Levitation" came out in 1980 and that was one of the earliest digitally recorded albums to be released.

[mcbpete]

TAL have just released the resampler portion of TAL Sampler for all your lofi dac needs: https://tal-software.com/products/tal-dac

Free if you already own TAL Sampler, about 20 quid if not ...

[Guest Chesney]

What are you trying to achieve soundwise? Just character going into the computer?

You could just get a clean interface and use sound random stuff for colour on the way into it.

[Cryptowen]

there's definitely something special about the low quality sound of certain 80s gear, even though in theory it's digital & should be totally replicable. one of my favourite eras for music exploration was when a local indie rock band gave me an old korg dss-1 that had got encrusted with bird shit (their jam space was right next to the saint john harbour & a seagull flew in through an open window one day). it weighed like 40 pounds & was a total pain to move around but dang it sounded beautfiul. analogue filter + old ass digital delay + extreme low bitrate crunch gave everything this wonderful hazy quality (at the time i was mostly just making SAW-II knockoffs so that was perfect). Still had a 90s PC at the time & was able to make custom floppy disc sample packs for it, spent an entire summer just noodling around making echoy melodic pieces out of snippets of voice//strings//etc (which would all be turned into vague synthy blips & pads by the DSS-1)

 

but also to echo what drukqs said: you can still get all kindsa sweet low frequency weirdness just by using common modern equipment & software in vaguely unintended ways. imo the key is training the brain to pick up on all those weird little microtextures & not automatically parse it as "that's a mistake i need to clean up" but as "oh that's interesting, i wonder if that can be consciously taken somewhere?"

[marf]

digital was around in the 70's. The eventide h910 was made in '75

https://www.sfu.ca/~truax/pod.html

Bell labs

Charles Dodge "Earth's Magnetic Field" is good. 

Lots of other stuff Im surprised to find. Who ever had the time allotment for the monster machines they had to use.

Barry Traux

Chowning of course. 

You have to look hard

 

I figure an old digital delay/ reverb with some mods would do the trick, and some old samplers

[ignatius]

yeah.. mentioned the H910. there were a few things.. but i'm wondering if _part of_ the magic you are hearing isn't just the analog tape and solid state mixers?  

 

i stumbled upon a video of a roland Re5 digital echo supposed to be like a tape echo. there's a video somewhere and it sounds really quite good. apparently it's pretty rare. the re3 roland digital echo is more available and apparently sounds good too. 

 

if you are looking for the sound of older converters and nice analog chips i'd check out the oto boxes.  they're a bit spendy and they sell out limited runs.. but the bim and bam FX boxes are true 12bit converters and quite good. they're pretty special. 

 

he's got a 'color box' coming out or perhaps it's out already? it's an analog thing though

 

it's the boum.. but have a gander at the bam and bim if you want some classic sounding digital stuff that's got a bit of modern functionality. 

 

https://www.otomachines.com/product/bim/

 

other than those and some possibly hard to find older digital stuff you could just start hunting for a revox or similar 2 track tape machine. 

 

plogue's chipcrusher is basically a model of numerous consumer devices with telephony and background noise etc controls.. worth a gander. 

 

there's a handful of really good digital processors out there in various plug in formats for really changing subtly to drastically the age and character of whatever you put through them.. more so than just simple bit and sample rate reduction. 

[marf]

thanks, Ill check that stuff out. Im just playing with supercollider for ages and it sounds almost too good. I like it for fft. But I fire something up in OS9 or turobosynth and damn. I love it

[kakapo]

 

if you are looking for the sound of older converters and nice analog chips i'd check out the oto boxes.  they're a bit spendy and they sell out limited runs.. but the bim and bam FX boxes are true 12bit converters and quite good. they're pretty special. 

 

he's got a 'color box' coming out or perhaps it's out already? it's an analog thing though

 

it's the boum.. but have a gander at the bam and bim if you want some classic sounding digital stuff that's got a bit of modern functionality. 

 

https://www.otomachines.com/product/bim/

 

 

 

The BIM specifically has a new 'thru' mode which sounds like what the op is after.

 

Edit:  In software check out the RX950 emulation of the Akai s950 converters and filter.  I usually don't like this kind of thing, but I shelled out for it after using it a couple of times.

[TubularCorporation]

I've had (and deeply regret tradinging) a couple of early 16 but digital delays, most notably an ADA one second delay that I traded for a Boss RDD-10 and have missed ever since. In the room, with no recording medium at all, there is definitely something really special about the sound of SOME of those old boxes. others just sound bad (sometimes in a good way, though). I wouldn't be interested in recording to early digital media but the converters can be great. I still kind of want an Akai s1000 some day, just for the converter interpolation and the reverb, but it's very low priority.

The OTO BAM also has a new thru mode in the latest update, similar to the BIM. The BAM is actually 16 but not 12, so it probably provides a different flavor to the BIM.

[TubularCorporation]

Oh, you can add Ned Lagin's "Seastones" to the early digital list. I don't know of it was recorded digitally but it was the first piece of digital music to be performed live in concert with microcomputers, back in the early 70s.