Re: Gear plug: Tascam 564

[buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)]

>>could you do it digitally? Seems like going through the compression
>>algorithm multiple times would do a number on the audio. Have you tried 
>that
>
>That was Electronic Musician's biggest gripe with the whole MD format in
>last month's review of the 3 machines in the market.  When you bounce
>tracks, you run through the ATRAC compression each time.

Is this worse than with tape?  I.e., one generation of
lossy compression is better (sounding) than one generation
of tape.  I would hope that three generations of lossy
compression would be better than three of tape, although
I can see how it might not be.  I'd hope that would be
part of the definition of a "good lossy compressor".

Presumably by definition, there's no way to avoid the
decompress/compress, even if it were a digital mix;
mixing of straight digital signals is simple (simple
addition), but mixing of compressed signals probably
isn't.  (One _can_ define compression methods where
this isn't true, but it hardly seems worth it.)

To put it a different way, if you have two tracks of
compressed digital audio, and you mix them into one
track, you end up using half as much storage.  So you
_have_ to lose some more data.

Sean Barrett