Brother's In Arms

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Dire Straits were early adopters of digital recording, thanks to Mark Knopfler's constant striving for better sound quality. "Thanks to Mark, that album [Brothers In Arms] was among the first to be recorded on a Sony 24-track digital tape machine," explains Neil Dorfsman. "One of the things that I totally respected about him was his interest in technology as a means of improving his music. He was always willing to spend on high-quality equipment, and I actually remember the night he made the decision to try digital.
"We were working on Love Over Gold at the Power Station, and we spent a really long time getting the piano sound for a song called 'Private Investigations'. We were so impressed with the result that we played it back several times for people to hear, but every time we played it back the sound lost something. I can recall the expression on Mark's face: dismay and a look of 'We've got to do something about this. The sound is going to wear out.' It was at that point the lightbulb went on in his head and in my head that we had to work in another way, and digital seemed to be the answer."
But was it the answer? After all, the sound of those early 16-bit digital machines was nothing compared to that of the current generation, and neither was the reliability. "I did Bob Dylan's Infidels record [1983] on [an early digital] machine, and it was a nightmare," Dorfsman confirms. "You couldn't edit, you couldn't really do anything. All you could do was record, and sometimes not even that. The converters would fail, error correction would be audible and things were generally weird. However, the Sony 24-track that we used for the entire Brothers In Arms album was a different story. I loved it from the very beginning, I thought it was great.
"I'd never liked the way analogue tape changed the sound — I was always disappointed with what was played back right after recording. I didn't like the way it changed the bottom end and softened things. A lot of people do like that, but I never did. And when people asked me, after Brothers In Arms came out, whether I'd changed my miking technique or style of recording to accommodate digital, I told them I'd done exactly the same things that I'd done with analogue, but without having to worry about adding extra top end because it would degenerate."