OTHER TECH

Are you breaking out things you've never played before? We are breaking out songs we've never done before. We had a hard time doing them before, but everything is sounding good, and the singing is just phenomenal. I'm really, really excited about it. And the Styx-Boston combo, from the fan standpoint, is going to be awesome. [For tour dates, go to bandboston.com and styxworld.com.]

So, on another note, since you're an analog man at heart more than digital . . . Actually, you could say I'm analog to the total exclusion of digital. Going from analog to digital - that's a nasty thing.

Okay. So why is analog the better listening experience? Well, I'm spoiled rotten because I only hear two kinds of music: live and all-analog. When I have to deal with digital because of CD mastering, I don't like it that much. Even in 24-bit, I'm sorry; it's not as good as analog.

How come? Digital sounds a lot different than the original source. Things are further compromised when you decrease the resolution to 16 bits from 24 bits or higher. The combinations of only 16-bit resolution and only a 44.1-kHz sampling rate absolutely demolishes any part of the signal above 10k. If you put a 12k tone, which most people can hear, through a 16-bit, 44.1k sampling at digital conversion, you will be shocked at what that waveform looks like coming out the other end. You can put a pure tone in, and it comes out looking like some garbled, monstrous thing. If that came off a cassette, you'd say, "See why cassettes sound terrible?" Take it a step further to MP3s, where that 16-bit signal is further demolished. It's already terrible, and compressed in unnatural ways.

And if you changed the frequency of that 12-kHz signal just a percentage point, the signal that spits out will look entirely different. So every time somebody hits an "s" or a cymbal, or plays a delicate violin or even a raunchy distorted guitar with lots of high frequencies, the high-frequency end of that spectrum is completely mangled into something different. That's why people speak about strange sibilance, or things sticking out or not sounding "right," when they listen to CDs. It isn't right. It's completely different than the original recording.

That's the technical root of the problem. If I can get a little more "earthy" here for a minute, music is an analog phenomenon. It results from analog devices. Wood and metal vibrations force the air to send out compression waves at the speed of sound to your eardrum - which is also very analog, and which sends signals to your brain. The whole process is a completely analog phenomenon. There are no numbers or bits involved with it anywhere. The idea of trying to encode that into some kind of mathematical thing and then reassemble it is a great idea, but it would have to be done with a lot more care.

The big thing to me still is that A/D conversion. I have never have had anybody explain to me why they can't develop a technology to get rid of the phasing and the distortion. It annoys me, and it's bizarre to me that technical people put up with the alteration. If you look at the waveform, it doesn't even look like the same thing. Maybe more so for me, because I used to use the old analog oscilloscopes and I used to measure things like headroom. You get an exact picture, and you could a copy from one track to the next. You may get a tiny bit of rounding from slew-rate limitations, but that waveform looks virtually identical to the first one. Your copy bounces from track to track.

So, to sum up, digital is a risky place to go. When they eventually come up with the world's first transporter that breaks you down into a set of numbers and reassembles your matter someplace else - well, I'd be really careful about that. [chuckles]

Another good reason why the analog champion is duty-bound to do vinyl. I'm a music fan in the purest sense, and I just love the way analog sounds. And I don't like the way digital sounds.

The care that you've taken with your recordings make them sound much better than most everything else out there. Thanks, Mike. It was always my hope that the little things I did in those recordings would show up and be noticed. I usually have way more ideas than I have places to put them on a recording, and I have a very hard time deciding between various things I've come up with for playing a chord or even a note in a song as it repeats. So I figure I'll just do it differently each time. I think most people don't get it - it blows by them, and that's fine. But it's a nuance that, for people who listen to it a lot, they'll find that there are no two choruses or verses that are the same.

It makes it a more enjoyable listening experience. There isn't any "false perfection," as we were saying earlier. That takes the emotion right out of it. That soul you're trying to go after would be gone. That's it. You can't get emotion by cutting and pasting. That's my theory.

What's next on the horizon for you, musicwise? I'm working on a new album, which has some rearranged and remixed songs from the Corporate America album, which didn't sell very well. I still don't quite have it done, and in the back of my mind I've been thinking about doing an analog version of it for vinyl.

You should absolutely do that. There's a growing market for vinyl out there. College kids are getting into it too. That's nice to see, because when I was in college, college kids were on the cutting edge of sound quality. They were the ones who built their own tube power amps and kit preamps in their dorm rooms, and had really good stereo sound. Now, college kids download MP3 files and think it's cool - it's cheap, it's quick, and it's convenient, but the sound sucks. [laughs] I'm spoiled. I can't listen to MP3s.

I'm not saying MP3s don't have a place. It's great to have them in your pocket when you're going out for a run. But the point is, it could be so much better. But it isn't, because people are happy to buy it at that quality. The cutting edge of that is marketing to kids. College kids downloading stuff - that was the opposite when I was in college. College kids were spending hours soldering and building their own systems in order to play the new stereophonic records, and through high fidelity. But anyway, hopefully, the pendulum will swing the other way.