Analogic Versus Digital Sound Engineers

Analogic Versus Digital Sound Engineers

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In the old age of analog sound, the sound engineer was an artist more than a technician. He had to control a huge table with multiple EQs buttons, know how to mix etc, but his skills were mostly based on a very fine ear, great imagination to create sound and some left hand to manage people. He was sandwiched between the demanding client or the listener (in radio for instance) and the voice talent, journalist or anchor at the other side of the double window.

These were the sound engineers I grew up with as a radio journalist back in the 80s when I worked for Radio Nederland Wereldomroep.
Well this a nostalgic moment, just to realize that the world has changed so much. That to record a radio program, you don't need all those machines like the Revox or the huge mix console, etc. A good computer work station with ProTools will do a much finer job, provided you have the right mikes and the right acoustic isolation without the obnoxious sound reflections. But you still need the real technician, a man whose work is so essential for a successful audio communication. But that analogical sound engineer could be completely at a loss in today's fully digital world, unless he brushes up his audio skills to the new changing technologies. An audio engineer today in 2010 has to turn himself into an IT manager, familiar with the intricacies of computing, because his old analog world has been reduced to just two elements: the microphone and the cable than transports the sound. You may argue that these elements are crucial, and indeed they are, but once that the sounds is converted into binary code, then you have to understand what is going on to be able to tranform, encode, compress and manipulate audio in every possible way. If analog audio can't be transformed or copied without a clear loss of quality, digital sound supports multi generation changes without altering its intrinsic quality.

But the digital audio engineer knows that this is not that simple. The universal 44100 khz 16 bits sampling if reduced to lower frequencies can distort and make the sound unusable, so trafficking with digital sound can be delicate if you don't know how the computer processes the sound. Also a deep knowledge of computing is needed to fix the too frequent problems of lack of compatibility among software programs. Because at any given moment, with any audio or video production, the audio engineer uses many software programs, written by different companies, so they are not necessarily compatible or tested, so all of a sudden in the middle of the recording session the system falls down, there is a bug that spoils the job and tests the patience of the team.

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