Nismo said:
"Jack White is on record as claiming that analogue is the pinnacle of recording technology, so nobody should really be surprised that The White Stripes latest, Elephant, is available as a double-vinyl issue."

Basically they've gone on record saying they don't like newer recording technology. You can read into that however you want, I read into it as they like that scratchy record sound. Their recordings are definitly not clean. Which is good - I like it to sound more human than machine.

The band I play guitar in recorded our album on 24-track, 2 inch tape, and it's clean as clean can be. Honestly, this whole digital-vs-analog thing is largely a bunch of swagger, and what grain of informedness it once had in it was based on the admittedly dismal performance of early digital recording technology (coupled with the recording industry's overal unfamiliarity with it and with using it). You can make a warm, scratch, low-fi digital recording, just like you can make a perfectly clean sounding analog recording.

Sorry, I got carried away off topic. Bit of a pet gripe with me there.

Stacked summed it up pretty well. I'm a recording guy, and the analog thing is not about making "scratchy old-timey" sounding records - that's just an insult to the fantastic recordings that have been made on analog gear in the past. A lot of it is really "swagger".

With that said, I don't think the White Stripes recordings would sound a heck of a lot different if they recorded straight to a good digital system. It's really more about the pre-amps, guitar amps and mics used in combination with White's voice that makes them what they are.

walkswithbears

United Kingdom

March 2003

OCT 26, 2004 06:27 AM

souljacker said:

Dogslife said:

Anton said:

walkswithbears said:
is this one going to include melody then?

You know what melody actually is, right?

You can criticize The Strokes for a lot of things, but to say they don't write strong melodies is just bizarre.

While we're at it, The Beatles' conception of instrumentation was just too limited.

And Talking Heads never understood that good rock n' roll can be danceable.

And Nirvana dicked around too much with complicated song structures.

No, you don't understand. It's INDIE and HIP and ALTERNATIVE to criticize The Strokes and say they are aren't as good as {fill in name of shitty garage band}.

but i don't like {fill in name of shitty garage band} either. i don't like the strokes because they're just shit.

rottenart

Norman, OK

February 2004

OCT 26, 2004 06:30 AM

interesting note: i partied with a band here a while back out of NYC called White Light Motorcade. when i asked the lead guy if he had ever played with the strokes, he threw a shit fit and got all defensive, saying how much shit he thought they were and how they were an insult to all the "real" bands in new york city.

moral?

never talk to other "not-so-famous" NYC garage acts about the one that made it.

foolycooly

Australia

June 2004

OCT 26, 2004 08:10 AM

Everyones gotta start out somewhere, and people seem to forget that one or two albums is only that the start. But instead we go dumping all this hype and expectations on a band, that metaphorically are still yet to hit band puberty. Seriously The Beatles, The Stones, Bo Dylan, these bands arent great because of two of their albums, they are great because of the years of touring, and effort, and the huge wealth of music and albums they created. So perhaps if we gave bands sometime to grow up and find themselves before we expected so much of them, we might enjoy their stuff a little more, and not be so fucken uptight about it all.

Vampirate

Durham, NC

October 2004

OCT 26, 2004 09:09 AM

spaced_out said:
my 2 cents from someone with, i like to think, a decent sceintific background:

the shortcoming of digital recording is that is technically cannot every be truly as accurate as analog: recall the smooth curve (analog) vs. stepped approximation of that curve (digital). NOW: can human beings REALLY tell the difference between that (extremely close) approximation and the real thing? At the audio quality level of modern cd's (and audio dvd's), probably not. And of course, the reason digital is superior is that it is entirely based upon 0s and 1s, and thus, is exactly the same from the first time you play it to the last.

My addition to this, from someone who wrote his undergraduate thesis on digital audio:

First of all, what you hear from a digital source is a stair-steppy signal (which WOULD wig your ear out), but actually IS a smooth curve. When an analog signal is digitized, it goes through an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, which doesn't just sample the signal every 44,100th (sampling rates vary!) of a second, but also makes sophisticated guesses and approximations about the behavior of the signal, before finally spitting out a sample. When a digital signal is then played back, it goes through a digital-to-analog (D/A) converter, which pretty much does the reverse job of the A/D converter, smoothing and splining, etc. These things are not created equal. People complain about the quality they're getting from their sampling rates and bit depths, and have big-dick fantasies about 96 bit, 192 kHz audio DVD, when really they would probably do just fine with some decent converters.

But, even with excellent converters, there still is some inaccuracy introduced from only having 8^16 or 8^24 or whatever different possible values that your digitized signal can take on, as opposed to the theoretically infinite gradation in values possible in an analog system. This is called "quantization noise."

For the record, the signal-to-quantization noise ratio inherent in 24 bit audio recording is better than the signal-to-noise ratio of the highest quality tape systems, and both are basically inaudible.

TheRevolutionary

San Diego, CA

June 2004

OCT 26, 2004 12:40 PM

ive listened to a number of their songs and i listened to them for a while, but it just got old really fast.

_mike_

San Diego, CA

November 2002

OCT 26, 2004 01:38 PM

they write great beer / soda / old navy / toyota type jingles

RubberSoul

Los Angeles, CA

February 2003

OCT 26, 2004 04:58 PM

foolycooly said:
Everyones gotta start out somewhere, and people seem to forget that one or two albums is only that the start. But instead we go dumping all this hype and expectations on a band, that metaphorically are still yet to hit band puberty. Seriously The Beatles, The Stones, Bo Dylan, these bands arent great because of two of their albums, they are great because of the years of touring, and effort, and the huge wealth of music and albums they created. So perhaps if we gave bands sometime to grow up and find themselves before we expected so much of them, we might enjoy their stuff a little more, and not be so fucken uptight about it all.

Basically, Nirvana is considered an all-time great band on the strength of two albums (plus a shotgun blast).

TheRevolutionary

San Diego, CA

June 2004

OCT 26, 2004 06:16 PM

um...sex pistols