Sorry it's taken so long to post about what I've read from the book I borrowed, Principles and Practice of Electronic Music by Gilbert Trythall. I got caught up learning about conductors and transmitters and then realized I still didn't understand the bulk of it. Kept reading about analogue recording though.
It's amazing to me that just how the recording process was considering what it is today. Today, you can hover your mouse over an audio region, then splice it, copy it, comp it, and the quality remains pretty constant, unless the edits are bad. But reading about how it used to be done is fascinating. The tape machine had three heads that read the magnetized tape. The play back head the recording head and the erasing head. Each just as important as the next. Initially the playback and the recording head were as one, but oodles of latency issues arose from that because it took milliseconds longer to record within the same timeline as the playback. This was corrected through manually adjusting the tapes so they were aligned properly. To reduce this hassle, they made one head into two heads.
Also, because of the limited amount of different tracks you could have started at 2 (then 4 and 8, then 16 to 24) you were required to comp any finalized track to an already existing track and then work with the track availability you have. However, through comping, you were also compromising the sound quality every time you have to re-magnetize the audio. Nowadays, you have unlimited amounts of digital track availability. Also, even if you are limited to a track number, digital comping leaves a lot less audible artifacts. Its taken the science and engineering out of it, but digital recording has most certainly progressed the quality of music and ease of recording.
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