that makes sense to me, so I'd think people would be looking forward to the era when virtually the same CD can be produced entirely within a daw -- maybe not as good a final product as if you invited an audience into a studio to listen to tape over monitors -- but every bit (literally) as good as any CD produced with high end analog equipment

Yeah, a recording made on analog tape and then mastered to CD will sound different and arguably better than an all-digital recording mastered to CD, just as a recording of a guitar played through a genuine tube amp and played back on a solid-state sytem will sound better than a guitar played through an overdriven home stereo and then played back on the same system. Make sense?

Leave it to Yep to say it much better and to the point than my rambling post did... I apologize for getting carried away.

The problem these days is not making a great recording but keeping it that way. If you let one of those so called mastering houses run it through their "major label quality" systems it will just be squashed to bits (ha ha) and any difference between analog and digital won't matter. Or worse all anyone ever hears is an mp3...

The ads for mastering houses crack me up. They promise "major label quality".. I fell like calling them up and asking "Can't you do any better then that ?"

Also very valid. But I'm already on the record in numerous other posts/threads regarding my feeling and frustration with the current "pro" trend of "squashing".

I'm off to Canada.... have a great weekend everyone.

D.

This one is out of my price range (I'm generally a $99 guy) - anyone heard the mcdsp analog channel?
http://www.mcdsp.com/products/analogchannel/

The Analog Channel Emulator AC2 plug-In is an emulator of the most popular analog tape machines (and tape mediums) known to the professional audio recording industry. Playback systems from Studer, Otari, MCI, Ampex, Sony, and Tascam are available in a single 'reproducer' (*). Modern and vintage tape formulations, IEC standards, and tape saturation release (not found on any other 'reproducer') round out the control section of the world's most flexible tape playback/recorder.

Standard tape machine parameters such as bias, playback speed, and IEC1/2 equalization are provided. Control well beyond the limits of the 'reel-world' devices includes adjustable low frequency roll off and head bump - independent of playback speed. You can select from several playback head types, and even control the rate at which tape saturation is dis-engaged. And instead of frequency sweeps and test tones, the playback head and tape saturation responses are displayed in realtime - updated with every control change.

Sounds interesting, yes?

ORIGINAL: alanfc

hi,
just experimenting with this Cakewalk FX-2 Tape Sim effect. I have no budget to buy anything new right now.

It has a couple options for tape speed and light-heavy saturation.

I know theres a million Warming products out there but I never see any discussion of the actual Frequencies that are affected. Something about harmonics and saturation etc. but no numbers.

This Cakewalk one brightens and distorts things in a signficant way. I'm just curious. It seems like its just a big boost at the high end of the spectrum? I'm oversimplifying.

I like it actually, its like a big blanket has been removed from my tracks. Without tweaking though, it's nasty.
So as part of my edu. on frequencies- what am I hearing saturation or some fake frquency boost?


thanks

You're hearing some compression and even-order harmonic distortion-- basically the plugin is introducing additional harmonics to the frequency of the recorded material. These harmonics roughly coincide with pleasing intervals such as octaves, fifths, fourths, and natural thirds. The sound becomes brighter, fuller, and livelier. Overdoing it will give your listeners a headache.

Cheers.

even-order harmonic distortion

For your reading enjoyment: 3M's Views on harmonic distortion.

(Don't let these guys sneak in and calibrate your decks!)

ORIGINAL: alanfc
I know theres a million Warming products out there but I never see any discussion of the actual Frequencies that are affected. Something about harmonics and saturation etc. but no numbers.

This Cakewalk one brightens and distorts things in a signficant way. I'm just curious. It seems like its just a big boost at the high end of the spectrum? I'm oversimplifying.

I like it actually, its like a big blanket has been removed from my tracks.thanks

if you get really curious, you could:

1. start with a one clean audio track
2. clone it, including the audio data
3. set up your mixer so the master is summing your two souce tracks
4. add the effect to one of your source tracks
5. phase invert one of your source tracks

effectively, the mixer apply the effect and then subtract out the original, so on the master bus you hear only frequencies that have been affected by your plug in

then if you want, you could run the result through a spectrum analyzer and look at the frequencies

digital-saturation fx have the potential to add frequency-aliasing to a mix. I don't mean that every saturator does this, but maybe that is one reason that not all saturation plug ins sound as relaxing

Here's an outboard tape emulator from Rupert Neve. Maybe he's on the right track?


http://www.rupertneve.com/porticorange.html


$1440 is still cheaper than buying a tape machine with all the extra maintenance and tape cost. Just a little more than a nice mic pre.

So, what about mastering to tape? I've read and heard many folks mixing down their stereo mixes to analog during mastering. Is it too late by then to grab some of that "warmth" or does it still "help" the mix (assuming of course it is done correctly)?

Well, like the guy said about never wanting to touch a razor block again...ditto!

But really, aside from drums on hard rock tunes, I can't think of anything that benefits from tape saturization. I think its easy to duplicate. Just drop all the highs above 14k and give it a bass bump around 250hz. Then run it through some compression.

I never want to see a reel of tape again! Call me pampered.

ORIGINAL: DonnyAir

But really, aside from drums on hard rock tunes, I can't think of anything that benefits from tape saturization. I think its easy to duplicate. Just drop all the highs above 14k and give it a bass bump around 250hz. Then run it through some compression.

Man.... Joe, I don't know what decks you had experience with, but that thing about dropping all the highs above 14k and giving a low end bump of 250 to emulate the sound of tape couldn't be further from the truth.

I mean, are we talking about your experience with a Tascam Porta One here ?

On a pro deck, the ultra high frequencies were not only reproduceable, (20k+) but sounded better because of the even-order harmonics involved.

The "air" , transparency and warmth on vocals absolutely shined on analog and there were times that a tube or class A pre wasn't even needed to obtain this.

Again..I miss my editing block and razor blade like I miss my ex wife, but as far as the sound goes, I can't see how you justify these commen

Glad you addressed it, Donny, because I was about to.

I do not miss having to align the heads, calibrate the machine, splice tape..... which I never liked in the first place!..... etc, but I have brought my analog decks back into the CR for the very reasons you state above. Now I am waiting for my ADC punchdown patchbays to arrive so I can hook it all up.

ORIGINAL: DonnyAir

PS.... I haven't found a plug in sim yet that sounds like analog tape does when you whack it hard at +6... have tried many, and might be, AFAIC, the one exception to my opinion that plugs are better than hardware...perhaps it's out there, but I haven't found it.

D.

Whack it hard at +6??? MY G*d man....that's not just a whack, that's a direct shot with a ballpeen hammer!<G> What the heck were you recording? And how often did you align the heads?


PapaNate

There were many people with more money than skill who couldn't properly allign the heads on any deck, and then would scream about the *drop offs* and crap like that.

Well, the biggest problem in those days (before ADAT and cheaper gear started to emerge) was that the cost of the machines was so ridiculous that almost nobody could afford more than 8-tracks on Tascam decks until Fostex came along, but that was further hampered by the price of decent mics. Most home recordests were trying to get by with dynamic mics because that was all we could afford. Condensers were $2,000 and beyond. I bought that Peavey-PVM48 when it came out thinking it was a real God-send. AKG made it for Peavey and I think it was the first electret condenser mic ever made. I paid $250 for it and thought, "Maybe now I can finally get a good acoustic guitar tone." It did sound better than a SM57 or 58, but it was still nowhere near a real condenser. And all those dynamic mics made the bass bump even worse. This was especially true on Tascam decks, which had a worse bass bump than anything else out there.

Improper biasing was the worst culpret for bad frequency repsonse though in my opinion.

for every bass player and drummer wishing for 15ips, there were 50 times more singers and songwriters who like the clarity that 30ips would impart to vox. Since songwriters paid the bills...30ips was used.

Hmm...I disagree. I might well be wrong but it seemed to me that 15ips was used almost univerally on any multitrack machine above a good half track. Some of the half tracks seemed to do a little better at 30ips than their mutitrack counterparts, however, virtually every machine ever made had a better graph at 15 than 30. I found a few charts. The following isn't on my web server so it may not show up here. If not I'll upload to my server along with several others after the first of the month. But if you can see it, it shows the 30ips curve in red and 15ips in blue. Now, this is a great machine with less peaks and dips than just about anything I've seen before. Most decks didn't have a line anywhere near as flat as these. The blue 15ips curve is obviously better for anyone recording music. Not a lot better, but better. This is from an exceptional Sony APR-5000 1/2" half track, but its fairly typical of graphs for all decks. I mean, they all have different (and usually much bigger) peaks and dips, but virtually any deck should give a more usable frequency response at 15ips. The only decks I know of that were used at 30ips were wide format half track mixdown decks. But even most of them were run at 15ips to the best of my knowledge.



There's a nice sounding bandwidth limit to tape that I find pleasing.

Everybody does. Its mostly the warmth of that bass bump, and the cutting off of highs tends to take out some of the grit factor. But we can do the exact same thing with digital waves using a little EQ. It ain't rocket science.

What do any of you old timers remember about the Fostex 250? I bought that one and I'm having problems RANDOMALY with it recording. Can any one help?....................JDW

I remember that little Fostex John. I never had one but we used to keep an Audio Technica AT-RMX64 4-track cassette in our rehearsal space years ago. One of the reasons we bought that was because Fostex had quit making the 250 and the later units they made were far inferior. We wanted a deck with Dolby C instead of DBX and found this used Audio Technica unit that turned out to be the Rolls Royce of 4-tracks. It maganged to get 15k of high end at 0-VU, which no one else ever did. That Fostex unit you have was great too though. As far as I'm concerned, those were the two best 4-track cassette units of all time.

I was astounded at how good the sound was on our Audio Technica deck. We generally couldn't tell the difference between stuff we recorded on that and stuff we recorded on my Tascam open reel gear. A lot of that, however, was due to the fact that we couldn't afford good mics back then. But 4-track cassettes get a bad rap. They were a lot of fun and were capable of sounding quite good if you had decent mics and engineering skills. And lets be honest; most adults aren't capable of hearing anything past 16k anyway by the time they're 25 years of age.

What's wrong with your deck?

ORIGINAL: Joe Bravo

Analog tape is capable of faithfully recording signals well above 40k on the high end all the way down to DC (0Hz) on the low end.

Name one that can do both. In order to achieve 40k you'd have to be moving tape at nearly 60ips and would still likely have to underbias the hell out of it. Slow tape speeds give you better low end, high speeds get you high end. 15ips is almost always the happy medium.

I have an old ADAT that records digital audio to analog tape (VHS) at 48kHz. It is definitely recording not fewer than 48,000 cycles per second, and it is doing it with pretty damn good accuracy. I can record 0 Hz on that same tape by dragging a refrigerator magnet across the tape, and that will be a zero cycle DC signal at any playback speed. Probably damage the tape heads and come out only as noise, but the tape would have it recorded. I could record anything slower than that by dragging the magnet back and forth a bit. Using tape at 15 ips? drag a magnet left to right across the tape for 7.5 inches and then from right to left for the next 7.5 inches. You just put down a 1Hz tone, for real.

AC is, after all, nothing more than an alternating version of DC, and the frequency response of tape is limited only by how close together the particles are compared with the tape speed, and those particles are pretty close together. I don't know the width of a ferrous oxide molecule off the top of my head, but I know it's pretty friggen small, and that, even at 15 ips, you could have a sequence of them alternating polarity considerably faster that the human ear can pick up. And as for slow waveforms, of course tape can capture subsonic signals-- just listen to the wow and flutter on some stretched-out old cassette or even on some of the old rolling stones records-- you can actually count the beats of the modulation, practically-- we're talking like FIVE cycles per second. And as I said above, all you need is a magnet and some tape to prove that tape can record right down to DC.

I'm not trying to pick a fight here, and I'm not trying to suggest that magnetic tape is somehow empirically superior to digital, or vice-versa. Those of us who are here on these forums, and looking for ways to use inexpensive digital devices to achieve high fidelity recordings are on the cutting edge of a fuzzy and evolving science of sound transduction and reproduction.

Back in the olden days (like, up until 1983), it was pretty much taken for granted that human beings could only perceive audio signals of 20 cycles to 20k, and that most of the stuff on the fringes of that range was more or less irrelevant, since (the conventional wisdom went) most people's hearing was much more limited than that. Moreover, you could probably have listed on five single-sided pages the addresses of every playback system in the US that was capable of actually reproducing full-frequency sound.

Witness the advent of digital recording, and the CD, and the sudden availability of an inexpensive, extremely high-fidelity medium to the masses, and all of a sudden stereo manufacturers are scrambling to catch up with the capabilities of the CD. Subwoofers start creeping into popular use. Speakers promising ultra-flat frequency response that was once the province of wealthy audiophiles and people conducting scientific tests rapidly became commonplace. The newly-available technology of digital audio spawned a new savviness among consumers, and a desire for across-the-board technical perfection even among casual music fans who were a few years ago content with crappy cassettes and 80Hz-12k playback systems. Digital meters tested digital signals and proved them to be perfect and suddenly, tape machines that had previously been regarded as state of the art began to look antiquated and old.(freq response almost as good as human hearing, lower mids reinforced to make up for the fact that nobody is supposed to be listening to speakers that can produce 20Hz, and so on).

CDs vastly improved the audio quality of everyday listening for everyday listeners. But, simultaneously, skepticism and doubt were brewing. Expert audiophiles were hanging on to their reel-to-reels. Neil Young was out there ranting about how anyone who liked CDs never heard a good vinyl record on a good record player. Million-dollar rockstar producers and boutique classical labels alike were eschewing the digital revolution and recording to tape, claiming that, whatever the numbers said, their ears told them tape was better. Expert ears, from Steve Albini to Rupert Neve were writing to trade journals and protesting the charts that proved the perfection of digital recording. Crusty old audiophiles and hip, modern dancehall DJs alike were buying vinyl records or reel-to-reel tape, expense be damned.

Theories as to why some very knowledgeable people still preferred analog abounded-- some theories were stupid, some were brilliant. Some were condescending and dismissive, others were thoughtful and open-minded. Digital gurus began to explore the possibility that hard cutoff filters at 20 and 20 might be limiting ultrasonic or subsonic information that could be affecting listener perceptions. They began to explore soft limiting features and harmonics reproduction and control. Dither was developed as a way to reduce digital truncation error. Higher sample rates were viewed as a way to better approximate the organic nature of sound waves. New theories and ideas about jitter and word-clock stability came into the picture.

The debate is ongoing and very real. Experts with far better knowledge than I have fight it out daily on internet message boards and the editorial pages of trade journals and at seminars and trade shows. But the job of the recording engineer remains the same-- to create the sonic landscape that they are looking to achieve as best they can with the tools that are available to them. One thing that is beyond dispute is that the tools currently available to the home recordist far surpass anything that would have even been dreamed of fifteen years ago.

Cheers.