Fun with Ozone 5 and Slate VTM and Toneboosters Reel Bus - With Video

Very interesting learning experience.

I am working with the Slate VTM and watched the videos from Steve and Fabrice, especially Fabrice.  The part I was interested in was the Sine Wave demonstration comparing to other tape emulations.
I thought I would do my own experiments here. 
I generated a 20 second 24 bit 44.1 440 HZ Sine Wave and loaded it into SONAR X1.
I then called into play the Meter Bridge from Ozone 5 which has some incredible spectral visualizations.

It was so interesting to see all of the the things that the plug ins were doing to generate complimentary frequencies based on the fundamental also seeing the other things related to the tape saturation at higher input levels.
You can actually see and hear the noise floors go up and down when switching between the various IPS settings.

I did not know exactly what I was looking at but I can see where the Glue would come in as the plugins are definitely doing some very interesting things with the spectrum and this was on just a simple waveform.

Try it your self and see what I mean.


**Update**
Just put together a rough (did I say rough) video to let you see and hear what I was working with.
Hope you enjoy and gain some information and inspire you to try some experiments your self to see what results you get.

Tape Machine Plugin Experiments Video

Bit,
One better.  I put together a short video so hope that helps.
It is in the original post just updated.
Thanks, it is very interesting to see what happens.

Thanks for taking the time to post this! Very informative. I purchased ReelBus and use it all the time on my drum buss. I love what it does to my sound: glues the whole kit together. VTM looks interesting but not in my price range. I'm a Sonimus Satson and ReelBus type of spender!

Waves set me up with a one month license for the Kramer Master Tape.  I just put it up along side of the other plugins (Slate Virtual Tape Machines, ToneBoosters Reel Bus and the Cakewalk Tape FX).

In all reality I am not seeing too much difference in what the Kramer is doing compared to the others.  I say it is a very close call and that ToneBoosters Reel Bus is really capturing the essence of what the others are doing.

The Cakewalk plugin illustrates in the most basic way what the principle is behind getting tape saturation effects.  The other plugins just take that concept and refine it.  I do notice some things the Slate is doing to the Left side of the SINE wave as opposed to others.  It seems it has something to do with the noise modeling somehow.

I also noticed a more dramatic Wow and flutter effect with the Kramer.

So if you are interested in jumping into the Tape Simulation game I would first try the Cakewalk FX and then move up to the Reel Bus and if you can find a deal then the Slate and the Kramer might work for you.

All in all it is a very subjective and subtle effect.  Thankfully for most products you can download and use a trial version first and do your own comparisons.

Thanks again 

Here's another for comparison. This is Bootsie's TesslaPRO.

Here's Ozone 4's exciter in Tape mode:

OK, one more just for grins...


This one's not a "tape sim", it's just a plain old unpretentious distortion plugin: Shred. 

But it's not just a matter of frequencies, is it...

Correct. I think. Tape responds differently to transients versus steady-state signals, so any real tape simulator would presumably do the same. 


It would be challenging to devise a repeatable test for that behavior, though. 

bit, did you do any sweep tones in your analysis? It's important to do those and observe the spectrum to find out if any of the plugins are aliasing. If your test tone is rising in pitch and any of the harmonics are descending, then you've got aliasing. ReelBus looks like it might be a candidate.

Rain, 
 
I know you don't use Nebula but you might be interested looking at this Alex B manual as a reference with more frequency and THD responses.

Although I haven't tried the AC202 Nebula 3rd party tape/ sat programs are by far the better tape emus out there. 

http://www.alessandrobosc...turators_FX_Manual.pdf

Good idea, Steve, testing for aliasing. I ran a wide sweep and then a 10KHz sine against each of my test plugins. There is indeed significant aliasing with FX Tape Sim,  ReelBus  and TesslaPRO (in that order, worst to best). Ozone 3 and 4 had no aliasing.

I'm using SPAN. I just duplicated your test, but with a 10KHz sinewave. 

Given that these effects introduce mostly odd-order harmonic distortion, and the 3rd harmonic for 10KHz is 30KHz, which is illegal at 44.1KHz or 48KHz, we'd expect a well-designed tape sim to have no visible effect on a 10KHz signal lest they introduce an illegal frequency component and resultant aliasing. 

I would expect that to be accomplished via a combination of oversampling and filtering. Each of the plugins I tested do appear to be applying filtering. ReelBus does use oversampling, apparently fixed at 2x.

10KHz is probably not the best test frequency to see aliasing. Something like 11KHz might show the effect better.

Bit you really have got me going here ;^)

Stay tuned to this station for further developments.

Bit,
When you were trying Ozone were you using the Exciter module?