Hi-Fi Choice Senior Contributor Neville Roberts interviews Yarlung’s Bob Attiyeh
NR: Bob, after listening to recorded music over many decades, I’ve found that music recorded on vinyl and especially copy-masters on professional analogue tape sound so much more detailed and complete than even my best high resolution digital music files. As a recording engineer and as a producer whose record label embraces both analogue and digital formats, why do you think this may be the case?
BA: My dear Neville, you ask a question with no perfect answer, and frankly the question in general opens a can of worms in the audiophile world. But this need not worry you or me! People who prefer analogue music reproduction and people who prefer digital music reproduction may never agree on answers to this question, or on the question itself. I happen to appreciate the qualities of both digital and analogue recording.
NR: That is so true. I have a very good friend who is also an audiophile, regular concert goer and an electronics engineer, and he is very focussed on measurements. He and I go back a long way and he tends to prioritise excellent measurable parameters, where digital formats excel. But I focus on how something actually sounds. I like to think that, as a physicist, I keep an open mind on things that we can’t measure with our current levels of understanding. After all, it wasn’t until 2005 that scientists finally managed to explain how bumble bees could fly! We constantly live in a world where new and unexplained issues arise that may only be understood sometime in the future.
BA: The analogue vs. digital debate is an important question since we listen to music for our pleasure, not to cure the world of Malaria or solve the climate crisis, or even help a wonderful creature like a bumble bee to fly. In other words, our enjoyment of our music depends on many factors, some of which are scientifically verifiable, and some of which are harder to pin down and quantify. So, here are my thoughts.
We make a big fuss at Yarlung Records about real music, recorded in acoustically wonderful concert halls with little or no post production. What we capture on tape and in high resolution digital in the acoustic environment of the concert hall is what we put on the disc, be that disc polycarbonate or vinyl. So “live music performance” is the standard by which we must judge our final results. And just as importantly, we hope to capture the music just as it is performed by our musicians so that we can share that performance with the listener, not share something manufactured in post production.
Technically, digital music, whether recorded in 256fs DSD or high enough resolution PCM to avoid the CD brick wall problem and other digital artifacts, can be seen to be more “perfect” on an analyser than analogue recordings from tape. But you asked about why analogue music might sound more detailed or complete to you. “Detailed and complete” may be different than “accurate or perfect.”
Here is my guess at an answer: when we think about live music and the way it sounded to us in a concert hall, we are actually responding to our memory of the sound, not the sound itself. Our brains and ears, especially when we are in larger acoustic spaces, make myriad adjustments to our perception of sound based on where we are sitting in a concert hall, how far we are from walls or other reflective surfaces and so forth. The actual sound where we are sitting in a concert hall, if reproduced for us exactly through speakers in a listening room, might sound and feel very different to us than did the original live event. It is my hunch that several “inaccuracies” in the process of recording on analogue tape help the playback through speakers better match our memory of that original musical performance. Three of these analogue tape “faults” may be contributing. These are not the only “faults” responsible for the magic of analogue tape, but they are the first three that come to mind:
1) analogue tape rolls off higher frequencies, depending on the tape and the recording equipment, around 24 to 26 kHz, but this roll-off happens in a way that sounds very “correct” and organic to our hearing. Unlike digital roll-off, tape roll-off is unique and more closely parallels the natural roll-off of human hearing.
2) Some audiophiles maintain that analogue tape electronics often accentuate the second harmonic. When one plays the note C, for example, or sings that note, the second harmonic in the overtone series is one octave higher than the C you are playing or singing. That overtone is much less loud than the original C, but it is present. Some feel that analogue tape makes this first overtone louder than it “should be,” with the result that the music sounds more organic and alive (richer perhaps) than it otherwise would. Interestingly, SonoruS equipment, such as we use in our Yarlung recordings, is pretty flat in harmonic representation. So, this particular “benefit” does not apply very much to the Yarlung sound.
3) Analogue tape compresses dynamics in the only way I know of that sounds correct to the ear. The loudest passages are slightly quieter than they would be during the live musical event, which means that the quieter details in the music are relatively louder to the listener when played back in your living room. This is the third area where I suspect that richness in your experience of analogue music playback gives you that extra musical information, Neville, information that might otherwise sound less lifelike to you listening to the same music on a “perfect” digital recording. What do you think? Might these hypotheses be correct or at least point us in the right direction?
NR: This makes sense to me Bob. I like valve or vacuum tube equipment and, as you say, the even-order harmonic distortions are much easier on the ears than odd-order distortions that semiconductor amplifiers tend to produce. Also, your comments about the roll-off above 24kHz also resonate with me. Even though we can’t directly hear frequencies that high, they do have a measurable effect on our perceptions. Research carried out in Japan into what is called the ‘Hypersonic Effect’ demonstrated measurable effects on the brain of differences when inaudible high-frequency components of Japanese Gamelan music were played along with the audible lower-frequency components. But how can this be if our ears can’t hear ultrasonic sound? It is now thought that ultrasonic sound is picked up by the appropriate parts of the inner ear through bone conduction and then transmitted to the brain, or the brain itself is stimulated directly by the ultrasonic sound and sends this information back into the middle ear for processing along with the audible sounds. After all, we have all experienced very low infrasonic frequencies, such as a thump on our chest from a bass drum. It has also been suggested, according to NASA, that the resonant frequency of the eyeball is around 18Hz and our eyeballs can also respond to infrasound. It does seem that these issues influence our enjoyment of music, and this can actually be measured using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure and record the electrical activity of the brain.
In the meantime, Yarlung’s vinyl and analogue tape releases mean that I consider Yarlung Records among my favourite four or five labels in the world. I think Yarlung is one of the few labels making new audiophile recordings, along with the UK’s Chasing the Dragon, Toronto-based UltraAnalogue Recordings and few others. Most of the other premiere labels concentrate on superb-quality reissues. So, thank you for continuing in this direction, Bob!
BA: You are most welcome and thank you for including Yarlung in such an illustrious group of companies. This is a real honour. We will continue to do our best to bring today’s musicians to your turntable and tape deck. Thank you so much for your support, Neville. After checking with Yarlung’s Arian Jansen to ask his thoughts on hypersonic frequencies, I have one speculation to add to your thoughts about frequencies higher than we can actually hear. High frequencies such as studied in Japan may be causing intermodulation effects within the audio spectrum as a result of our electronic playback, if not in the amplification circuits themselves, then certainly in speakers. These will indeed have an effect on the listener. Hence the magic we take advantage of with the correct roll-off of those frequencies through analogue tape. Which brings us back to your original question of the correctness or completeness of music as it sounds to you in analogue. As usual, Neville, you are on to something important!
Neville Roberts interviewed Bob on October 24th, 2022, edited and condensed for publication. Mr. Roberts writes regularly for Hi-Fi Choice and now concentrates on analog tape releases.