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Old 12-18-2008, 10:27 PM   #94
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Okay, this is probably a bit premature, but I might not have much posting time before '09, and I promised this in an earlier post:

A short buying guide to recording gear...

First rule is do *not* go into debt over a hobby (even if it is a hobby that you are certain will be your lifelong ticket to fame and fortune).

Second rule is do not buy anything that is not on your afore-mentioned pad of paper. The way to avoid sucker buys is to wait until you have actually needed something in one or more actual recording projects. There will *always* be stuff that you need.

Once you have saved up a significant sum to upgrade your studio, the absolute best way to shop for recording gear is to book a few hours at a well-equipped commercial studio and try out their gear. Be up-front about what you are doing, and you will find the people there very helpful. All recording studios these days are well-accustomed to dealing with home studio operators. For a few hundred bucks you can sit down with someone who has recorded actual rock stars and see how they would record you, try out the different gear, and see how they actually use it. Bring your MXL mics or whatever along and hear for yourself the differences that preamps make on your voice and your instruments. The knowledge is worth more than you spend, and any good studio will be happy to help, knowing that the biggest thing you will take away from the experience is the understanding of how valuable their gear and expertise is.

That said, here are some tips for approaching reviews:

-Professional studio operators and engineers are very likely to be unfamiliar with the low-end of the recording market. Very few top-flight engineers and producers have much exposure to a wide cross-section of $100 Chinese condenser mics or freeware plugins. They spend their days recording with established name gear, not scouring the web for freebie synth patches. So when a pro says that a certain plugin has finally broken the barrier to compete with hardware compressors or whatever, it might be only one of a half-dozen plugins he's ever seriously tried. Same with cheapo mics, preamps, and the rest of it. They may have no idea how much the bottom of the market has improved in the last 5-10 or even 20 years. And this is especially true of the big-name super-legendary types. HOWEVER, if they say that something sounds good, chances are very high that it does sound good.

- On the other hand, many amateur forum-goers have never had much exposure to top-flight gear. When someone on a forum says that X is the best mic they've ever tried, it is quite possible that they have never tried any other serious studio mics. And consensus opinions can emerge on individual forums and message boards with little connection to reality. Somebody asks about the best headphones, and one or two posters who have only otherwise used ipod earbuds rave about one particular model, and before you know it, some totally mediocre headphone pick gets a dozen rave reviews anytime anyone asks about headphones on that forum. HOWEVER, what these kinds of forum reviews are collectively *awesome* at is sussing out technical, durability, and compatibility problems. Professional reviewers often get better support and/or optimized test samples (especially with computer-based stuff), but a real-world survey of amateur forums can give a very good sense of the kinds of problems people are having with a particular model on big-box laptops and wal-mart computers not optimized for audio work.

- Professional reviewers are another conundrum altogether. The resume criteria for this position is often almost nil, and the accountability is even lower. Everything is "a useful addition" to an otherwise well-equipped studio. Which is useless info if you're trying to build a well-equipped studio in the first place. On a scale of 1-10, they rate everything a seven. Look for multiple 10s.

Down to the meat-and-potatoes:

Avoid intermediate upgrades. What the audio industry wants you to do is to upgrade a $100 soundcard to a $300 soundcard to a $700 soundcard to a $1,500 soundcard and so on. By this point you will have spent $2,600 to end up with a $1,500 soundcard, and the old ones will be close to worthless. And the next step is to upgrade to dedicated converters and a selection of preamps which will render the previous generation worthless.

Once you have functionally adequate gear, save up, and make your upgrades count. Buy the expensive, primo gear, not the incrementally "better" prosumer upgrade. Bona-fide professional gear holds its value and can be easily re-sold. A used $1500 Neumann mic can be sold tomorrow for the same $1500, and may even go up in value. But put $1500 worth of used prosumer mics on eBay and you're lucky to get $500 for them, and it will take a lot more work, hassle, and postage.

The price-performance knee has been pushed a lot lower in recent years, and there is a ton of cheap gear that compares sonically with stuff costing several times the purchase price. This means that the best deals are on the very low-end and the very high-end of the price spectrum. There are very cheap alternatives to mid-range gear on the one hand, and the heirloom-timeless stuff on the high end will hold its value on the other hand.

The next couple years will be a very good time to buy. The cost of old gear has been driven up exponentially in the past 15 years, even as the quality of low-end gear has shot up. A lot of pro studios have been closing their doors, but an ever-increasing number of hobbyist studios were driving up prices for heirloom gear in the days of easy credit and exploding home equity in the western world. You may have heard that those sources of personal wealth are collapsing. High-end studio gear has become a sort of "luxury good," and is very likely to start to lose value as buyers dry up and as lavish hobbyist studios get sold off in a tough economy.

There was a time maybe 15 or 20 years ago when you could just keep a sharp lookout for college radio stations and such that abruptly decided to "upgrade" to digital and you could get vintage tube preamps and such for practically or literally nothing. As stuff like ADAT and later ProTools allowed people to set up a "professional" home studio for sums of $20,000 or so, people began to look for ways to re-analogize their sound. And as the explosion of extremely cheap DAW studios came into being, prices for the old junk exploded, even as a newfound reverence for all things analog and "vintage" usurped the previous love of digital. This going to start to sound like a rant, but I promise it's going somewhere.

The explosion in prices for "vintage" and "boutique" gear was not driven by professional studios. Even before the home-studio boom, the arrival of cheap, high-quality digital and better broadcast technologies made a whole lot of local recording and broadcast studios redundant. There was a small increase in inexpensive project studios, fueled by the rise of punk, hip-hop, and "indie" music, but for the most part, the emergence of the ADAT and Mackie mixers spelled the beginning of the end for mid-market commercial recording studios, and began to turn broadcast studios into cheap, commodity workplaces devoid of the old-school audio "engineers" (who actually wore lab coats in the old days of calibrating cutting lathes and using occilloscopes to measure DC offset and so on).

The irony is that the explosion of cheap, high-quality digital fostered a massive cottage industry of extremely small home and project studios, that rapidly began to develop a keen interest in high-end studio gear. Even as broadcast and small commercial jingle studios and local TV stations (of which there were a LOT, back then) were dumping their clunky mixing consoles and old-fashioned ribbon mics and so on, there was a massive rise in layperson interest in high-end studio gear.

As the price of entry has gotten lower and lower, interest in and demand for truly "pro quality" sound has increased exponentially, and superstition and reverential awe has grown up around anything that pre-exists the digital age.

Some of this reverence is unwarranted. But there is no doubt that things were made to a higher standard in the old days, when studio equipment was bought on industrial and not personal budgets, and when consoles were hand-built to contract by genuine engineers who built only a handful of them per year, to order. Things were over-built, with heavier-gauge wires and components that were tested by sonic trial-and-error, and had oversized power supplies and artist-perfect solder joints and military-grade, noise-free precision knobs and so on.

There are still manufacturers working to this level of quality today. Whether and to what degree this stuff actually produces better sound quality is a bit like asking whether heirloom antique furniture is more comfortable than Bob's discount sofas. The answer is usually yes, and even when it's unclear, the difference in build quality and longevity itself usually has value.

The long and short is that genuine super-primo gear has intrinsic value that is likely to hold steady or increase as more and more of the world becomes interested in small-scale recording, even while cheaper, more disposable gear based on stamped PC boards and chips and flimsy knobs and so on continues to improve in quality, while simultaneously losing resale value.

The next year or two are likely to see a significant selloff by lavish home studios that were financed by home equity and easy credit in the western world. This is likely to lead to some very good deals for buyers. But in the long run, developing countries and increased interest in home recording is likely to sustain or increase the value of top-flight gear, even as the cost of low-end consumer stuff continues to decrease.
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