Remember in the early-90s when CDs were gaining popularity in the mainsteam and you could always find one set of three letters on the back of the CD?: AAD/ADD/ or DDD? These indicated “how digital” the CD was… AAD meant “Analog recording, analog mixing, digital transfer” while ADD was “Analog recording, digital mixing, and digital transfer” and DDD meant the entire recording process was digital. But then, by the mid-90s, those designations had all but disappeared. From my understanding, the letters were dropped because they really didn’t provide all that much useful information: people automatically assumed that “all digital” meant better, but that simply isn’t the case.
There’s not a whole lot of information out there, but here’s some stuff I came across:
- 10 Golden Rules for Collecting CDs… Rule 5: “AAD, ADD, DDD are Irrelevent.”
- How CDs work, including info about AAD/ADD/DDD.
- This made my head explode.
For some reason I remember that Grand Daddy I.U.’s Smooth Assassin was recorded entirely digitally and that impressed me.
Posted in Television, Movies, and Music
Brent October 17, 2010, 1:45 pm
Another letter to add is S, so an ‘SAD’ recording was recorded on shellac, then mixed in analog, then made into digital. Shellac Analog Digital can also refer to video game music recorded from a TV’s internal speaker to a cassette recorder microphone. Analog Analog digital would be the electrical process of recording using a wire from the game console to an analog recorder, Analog Digital Digital would the same thing, but using no analog recording, and Digital Digital Digital would be using a software emulator to emulate the sound chip using math.