The two-minute reviewer
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Aphex should resign itself to losing the Exciter market; digital eq has the exquisite property of providing the clarity, brilliance and "air" that has previously been accessible only by the harmonic phasing an Aural Exciter provided. My friend Greg played an interesting game with me - he had me use a Yamaha 02R with the windows for the EQ volume amount cut and boost covered up, and had me make a dull multi-track recording sound fine. Then he uncovered the hidden panels and heard me gasp as I saw boosts of +12 @ 14kHz, and IT SOUNDED BEAUTIFUL! Can you imagine adding 12db of 14kHz on an SSL and keeping your fillings in your teeth??
The reason this is possible is because there is none of the phase shifting there is in an analog equalizer. If you take a 10kHz tone and feed it to a channel of an analog console, run the output to a phase scope, then add eq at 10kHz to that tone, the straight in-phase line will turn into a circle as you increase volume at that frequency. If you do the same with a digital equalizer, the straight in-phase line will simply get longer - no phase shift will be induced. This leads me to a hypothesis:
The analog sound that we are accustomed to hearing is not "true" - it is filled with phase anomalies and is an inaccurate (although pleasing) representation of the actual sound. The "digital" sound that has caused substantial consternation among musicians and technicians alike is not the ABSENCE of analog recording elements - it is the absence of analog artifacts - and the fundamentally REALISTIC representation of the musical performance. Yeah, yeah, I know, a 44.1kHz sampling rate takes 44,100 "snapshots" of the audio, but that also means there are 44,099 moments of silence; nonetheless the contemporary results are substantially more accurate than those of analog.
Now the issue raises its ugly head - regardless of accuracy, which is more sonorous. The answer is analog. More specifically, tube mics thru tube preamps into tube recorder electronics onto analog tape of great width traveling at tremendous speeds. The more phase distortion the merrier. Just as Aphex used phase and distortion to give perceptible "edge" to murky analog recordings, we now need a digital "murker" to give thickness and fullness back to digital recording. Yeah, that’s it – M.A.D. – Murker Audio Devices. I’ve just created an empire.