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Re: Michi - - your thoughts on this . . .

... Taking the 44.1/16 to analog and then back into Nuendo may have added a sort of 'unintentional dither' to the original 16 bit PCM. That's the only thing I can really put my finger on as having merit when he talks about his hybrid approach. Bouncing to tape would, in a crude way, add dither. Of course there are other "qualities" that could have been added in the process that may have just been good to his ear: soft saturation, tape compression - but that just depends on how he bounced it.

As for "filling in the jaggies" -- In a way, you could be anti-aliasing via tape; but seeing that most 24-track tape (assuming that's what he's using) has response above 50khz, at least in the time domain you're talking about more resolution that 44.1 anyways. So at best you'd have to take into account slew rates of opamps, and at worst you'd end up simply offsetting your "jaggies" temporally, and getting some phase shifting and comb artifacts. (debatable as to whether this would be audible though.)

I think it'd be more "sensible" to take the approach you spoke of, adding dither intentionally in the final mastering phase while working on it at 176.4. Once you used 'tape for dither' I wouldn't suggest adding actual noise shaping in the final product; and the noise shaping methods we have today are much, much better than simple dancing bits caused by tape hiss.

I don't know why he landed on 96khz in the final mix. Maybe his intention was to shake the whole thing up a lot. Really, through that whole chain: bouncing to analog and resampling to 96khz, what your net effect would be, you'd end up with a more blurred high-end. So some dither was added, great, and maybe there's a net effect of a slight lowpass to warm up the sound some. It's probably his way of getting the sound he's looking for, and in a way, I can kind of see it working ... but there are more "informed" ways to get similar results IMHO.

Engineers have their secret tricks and methodologies, and I've seen a lot of them (including one guy who I did some work for who went A-D-D-A about twelve times at 44.1/16 - that made me cringe) : but these guys swear by them.

I'd "call out" a lot more of their methods if I didn't think I'd get shouted down by the good old "Well how come they're a fancy engineer and you aren't?" argument. Indeed maybe that question answers itself.

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