Digital won the argument about fidelity the year the compact disc went on sale, and it has never lost that argument on paper since. Analog vs digital metal production was never settled on paper, though, because the question heavy bands actually kept putting to their engineers, session after session and decade after decade, was not which medium sounds better but which one forces a decision, and on that question the evidence runs the other way.
The Canadian producer who had a Studer A800 twenty-four track machine shipped from his studio on Maui to a disused army barracks at the Presidio in San Francisco, wired it in beside an SSL console and a rack of Pro Tools systems, and then never threaded a single reel onto it, was Bob Rock. The record that machine sat out was Metallica's St. Anger. Nobody unpacked the razor.
Tape is carving. A sculptor working a block of Carrara marble drives the point chisel in with a mallet and knocks away a flake the size of a fist that will never go back, so every blow is a decision the finished figure has to live with, and a nose broken off in the fortieth hour means a different statue or a ruined block. A screen is modelling clay. Pinch a lump off, press it back, cut the arm away and set it an inch higher, and keep doing it until somebody calls the thing finished. Every quarrel about the two media is a quarrel over which of those hands a band wants.
Neither hand changed what a riff is or how a band sits around it, which is the ground covered in how heavy metal is produced. What changed is what could still be altered after the band had gone home.
The numbers in analog vs digital metal production
On the measurements digital wins outright. The compact disc standard stores sixteen bits per sample at 44,100 samples a second, enough for a theoretical dynamic range of about 96 decibels and a frequency response running to just past 20 kHz, while a professional two-inch machine at thirty inches per second managed something between 60 and 70 decibels between its hiss and its ceiling without noise reduction. Copies are exact. Nothing wears. The hiss is gone.
What tape added was not fidelity but a kind of mercy. Driven hard, it rounds the peaks off gradually instead of shearing them flat, and it adds harmonics that the ear reads as weight. The first digital converters did the opposite, and by common consent among engineers who used them the early machines sounded hard and glassy at the top. Tape's partisans still quote that verdict, long after those converters were scrapped.
The early converts
The Birmingham five who went first among the big names, cutting Turbo at Compass Point Studios in Nassau onto Sony digital tape machines and mixing it digitally at the Record Plant in Los Angeles for release in April 1986, were Judas Priest. The record split the band's audience down the middle. The machine took much of the blame for choices that were the band's own, the guitar synthesisers above all.
Harder to explain away is the second case. The quartet from upstate New York that had built a whole creed on refusing compromise, and sold itself as the last army of true metal against the false, answered to the name Manowar, and in 1987 it recorded and mixed Fighting the World at Universal Recording in Chicago on a thirty-two track digital machine, one of the earliest heavy metal albums made entirely that way. "Blow Your Speakers", the single, is the sound of a band that swore by steel quite happy to reach the speakers as a string of numbers.
No heresy was declared. The machine was new and expensive, so it was bought. The purists of the day blamed digital for thin records and never once blamed it for Fighting the World.
The edit that wrote the songs
Released by Elektra on 5 June 2003, St. Anger is the plainest exhibit the digital side has, and it cuts against both camps. The method at the Presidio was to jam for hours, record all of it and let the producer, who also played the bass on the record, assemble songs from the fragments on a screen, trying each riff at different tempos and with different feels until it held.
The guitarist whose riff came out of a jam of about eight hours, grew two songs, the title track and "Sweet Amber", and then vanished from both of them before the record was finished, was Kirk Hammett. On tape that riff would have had to survive as a performance. On a screen it could be a seed and then be pulled up.
"Frantic", which opens the album, shows the paradox at full volume. The most editable medium ever built was used to make a record with no guitar solos, a snare left ringing high and bare, and takes kept rough on purpose, so that digital, the medium blamed for polishing heavy music to a shine, here gutted every trace of polish off the songs. The screen did not decide the sound. It decided the songs.
The screen did not decide the sound. It decided the songs.
What the archive says
Tape's faithful like to say it lasts. The archive disagrees. Many studio tapes made from the late seventies through the eighties, Ampex 456 among them, have since developed sticky-shed syndrome, the binder holding the oxide to its backing soaking up moisture until the reel squeals, sheds and gums the heads of any machine that tries to play it. The cure is to bake the reel for hours at around 55 degrees Celsius and transfer it at once, because it reverts within about a month.
The palace at Pylos in the western Peloponnese kept its accounts on unfired clay, tablets meant to be smoothed flat and written over, and when fire tore through the building around 1200 BC the blaze baked more than a thousand of them hard in the collapse, which is the only reason anyone can read Linear B today. A remastering house heating a reel of 1985 tape in an oven is lighting that fire on purpose. The music comes back once. Then the tape starts to fail again.
Digital has its own version of the problem, colder and quieter. A session stored on a format nobody manufactures any more, or on a hard drive left in a cupboard for fifteen years, can be harder to recover than a baked reel, because the reel at least holds its music in plain magnetism that any working machine can read.
The return to tape
The Dorset band that went the other way, booking Toe Rag Studios in London between April and August 2007 and making Witchcult Today entirely on vintage analogue equipment for Rise Above, was Electric Wizard, and the man at the desk was Liam Watson, whose studio is built around old consoles and tape machines. Nobody forced the choice on them. That is what makes it evidence.
"Dunwich", from that record, is fuzz laid down thick with the drums set back in the room and nothing dragged onto a grid, and it sounds like a band deciding in the moment rather than a band being decided later. The apostasy was not nostalgia. It was a limit chosen on purpose.
The engineers in the middle stopped choosing. The Danish producer who once locked two tape machines together for Master of Puppets, and who now records drums, bass and guitars onto analogue tape with as much vintage gear as he can find before moving everything into Pro Tools for the edits, the overdubs and the mix, is Flemming Rasmussen. Tape at the front for the sound, the screen at the back for the undo.
| Record | Year | Medium | What it shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Judas Priest, Turbo | 1986 | Sony digital tape | The medium took the blame for the arrangement |
| Manowar, Fighting the World | 1987 | 32-track digital | True metal had no quarrel with the machine |
| Metallica, St. Anger | 2003 | Pro Tools, Studer unused | The screen can write the song |
| Electric Wizard, Witchcult Today | 2007 | Vintage analogue | Tape as a limit chosen, not suffered |
| Ampex 456 masters | 1970s–1980s | Two-inch analogue | Tape does not keep itself |
The verdict splits cleanly. Digital is the better recorder and the safer copy. Tape is the stricter editor, and a heavy band with a deadline, a budget and a drummer who needs to be told the take is finished has often needed the second more than the first. Nothing in the evidence says one medium makes heavier records.
What happened to those records once the digital ceiling became a target rather than a limit is a separate fight with its own casualties, the loudness war in metal.
