The politics of digitizing analogue recording technologies

In the field of pop music production, audio technology companies such as Waves and Universal Audio claim to reproduce the sound of “vintage” analogue signal processing recording technologies. They use software to emulate the form and sound of technologies that, in their hardware form, became highly valued parts of recording studios from the 1960s and 1970s. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which ideas about vintage analogue sound are reproduced in digital music production contexts. In addition to the sound such software plug-ins produce, I argue that these strategies also play a crucial role in the reproduction of these technologies.