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Post by popmann on May 21, 2019 21:42:16 GMT -6
Prior to Mixbus32c, I'd have said hurting. Whatever they've baked into the stew is lovely.
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Post by donr on May 21, 2019 22:26:19 GMT -6
As the proud owner of a Studer A800 MKIII i have to say that I've never hear an alleged digital tape sim that came even remotely close to what we get by tracking to the Studer. From what I can tell they're all (or almost all, I have not heard all of them) programmed by coders who have never actually worked with a professional quality tape machine in working condition. Digital coder, for te most part, have wildly erroneous ideas of what a quality analog tape machine does, sonically. They all concentrate on the artifacts induced by machines in poor condition. I have never had the opportunity to experience the Anamod and would like to - but at the prices that 24 track analog machines are going for now vs the cost of 24 channels of Anamod, I'll go for the real thing. Mixing from digital to analog is much more economical, but it doesn't sound remotely like tracking to anolog and dumping to digital for mixing through an analog board and processing and recording back to digital. John, maybe there's an opportunity for you and a digital plug-in developer to grok what you're getting at. Would be awesome if it occurred. I mean, couldn't it potentially, be done right? We're getting close in so many areas, especially the spacial free air part.
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Post by johneppstein on May 22, 2019 0:17:06 GMT -6
I have not heard the Zulu (which, as I understand it is an analog emulation), but, like the Anamod, you can buy a 24 track tape machine these days for what 24 channels cost.
I paid $5000 for my Studer, with another 2000 or so bucks (over time) to get it working properly.
16 channels of Zulu Modular is supposed to end up costing between 3k and 4k, according to Langston, that is whenever it is released. Well, that's a lot less than I thought. 24 would be between 4 and 5.5k then..... About what I paid for my machine not including recapping and other maintenance issues.
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Post by johneppstein on May 22, 2019 0:31:24 GMT -6
As the proud owner of a Studer A800 MKIII i have to say that I've never hear an alleged digital tape sim that came even remotely close to what we get by tracking to the Studer. From what I can tell they're all (or almost all, I have not heard all of them) programmed by coders who have never actually worked with a professional quality tape machine in working condition. Digital coder, for te most part, have wildly erroneous ideas of what a quality analog tape machine does, sonically. They all concentrate on the artifacts induced by machines in poor condition. I have never had the opportunity to experience the Anamod and would like to - but at the prices that 24 track analog machines are going for now vs the cost of 24 channels of Anamod, I'll go for the real thing. Mixing from digital to analog is much more economical, but it doesn't sound remotely like tracking to anolog and dumping to digital for mixing through an analog board and processing and recording back to digital. John, maybe there's an opportunity for you and a digital plug-in developer to grok what you're getting at. Would be awesome if it occurred. I mean, couldn't it potentially, be done right? We're getting close in so many areas, especially the spacial free air part. Maybe, but there are already companies with a lot of experience that are already doing emulations of that machine.
IMO the devil, as usual, is in the details. There are a lot of subtleties that need to be identified and analyzed and most companies would probably see the law of diminishing returns setting in. Actually I think that's the reason that so many emulation plugins are rated as being 80% to 90% there, which those selling the product clearly regard as "close enough".
The other problem here is that a digital plugin can't work until the signal has already been processed by an A/D converter and, as we know, although most companies brag about how "perfect" their conversion is, they all actually sound a bit different, so the ARE affecting the audio in some way. And the whole point of tracking to tape is that there's nothing in the way between the output of the mic pre and the tape machine. Tracking to tape and dumping to digital always sounds better ("different"?) than tracking to digital and mixing to or processing through tape.
Part of that might be the thing about the effects of "stacking" when combining channels...
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Post by svart on May 22, 2019 13:39:39 GMT -6
I think it's like anything in audio. When it works, it's helping. When it's not working, it's hurting. I've seen a number of bigger mixers using tape sims for effect, but never to make something sound "like tape".
A lot of time they want to soften transients and add minor distortion and it's easier to do with a tape sim than multiple other plugs that you need to dick around with to get right.
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Post by Martin John Butler on May 22, 2019 15:52:24 GMT -6
True. The Ampex ATR-102 gives my tracks a little oomph, and helps me use much less compression.
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Post by viciousbliss on May 22, 2019 21:23:02 GMT -6
What’s everyone takes on Cranesong Phoenix and Satin? The guy who worked on Satin explained in painstaking detail about how they modeled seemingly every little thing on a tape machine in this thread on KVR. I just use the ATR-102 preset and change it to vintage across the mix. Phoenix is my favorite for individual tracks. Oxide was my least favorite of the UAD. I vastly preferred Satin over their 102 and the studer sounded ridiculously close to my Overloud Tapedesk. A lot of the other tape sims dull things in ways I don’t like compare to Satin and Phoenix. On tracks I always put Dopamine right after any tape plug. Supposedly that Dolby type A trick was widely used.
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moze
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Post by moze on May 23, 2019 8:24:37 GMT -6
I go through phases with these things. One day I will be really into them and the next everything sounds fuzzy and distorted to me. I do tend to like the Phoenix but none of them really sound like a tape machine. We need somebody to make an air freshener that smells like 456.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2019 12:36:40 GMT -6
I have the UAD ATR-102. It's very hit or miss for me. Usually if the default setting with adjustments to the gain staging and simply cycling through the tape formulas doesn't get me pretty close to where I want to be, I bail on it. It's too tweaky for me, but when it does work, I like it quite a bit. I turn the cross-talk and the wow/flutter off 99% of the time and use 15IPS / 1/2". I like the 1/4" for the slap echo stuff. 456 and 900 seem to be the most commonly picked tape formulas. I have all the Stephen Smith presets and honestly, I just end up cycling through them to the point where I totally lose perspective and stop noticing the differences. I don't bother much with those anymore.
One thing I've found helpful about it, is that if I strap it on the mix buss and suddenly everything sounds better, I try to analyze what changed, bypass the plugin, then address whatever shortcomings I perceive in the mix. If I do that, then turn the ATR back on, it usually sounds A LOT better. It's a neat learning tool in that way.
Big thumbs up for the Massey Tapehead plugin too. That thing is so simple and it sounds awesome.
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Post by svart on May 23, 2019 12:38:56 GMT -6
I go through phases with these things. One day I will be really into them and the next everything sounds fuzzy and distorted to me. I do tend to like the Phoenix but none of them really sound like a tape machine. We need somebody to make an air freshener that smells like 456. I have a box of old 456 that I use like that, LOL. It's got the sticky shed and I need to unreel it for the reels but I don't want to spend the time doing it and then cleaning up the mess.
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Post by EmRR on May 23, 2019 12:49:10 GMT -6
We need somebody to make an air freshener that smells like 456. This may be the only truth.
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Post by chessparov on May 23, 2019 17:08:54 GMT -6
Hmm... 409 plus 47 equals 456.
Coincidence-I think not!
Great thread, thanks guys, lots of food for thought. Chris
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Post by jeremygillespie on May 23, 2019 19:54:35 GMT -6
The UAD A800 sounds great with the 250, 30ips, but you need to gainstage it correctly.
If you pull the input down a bit, and boost the output, it sounds REALLY good.
The 7.5 abs 15 don’t do it for me. They honestly just sound like they put a filter on the top.
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
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Post by ericn on May 24, 2019 7:29:04 GMT -6
John, maybe there's an opportunity for you and a digital plug-in developer to grok what you're getting at. Would be awesome if it occurred. I mean, couldn't it potentially, be done right? We're getting close in so many areas, especially the spacial free air part. Maybe, but there are already companies with a lot of experience that are already doing emulations of that machine.
IMO the devil, as usual, is in the details. There are a lot of subtleties that need to be identified and analyzed and most companies would probably see the law of diminishing returns setting in. Actually I think that's the reason that so many emulation plugins are rated as being 80% to 90% there, which those selling the product clearly regard as "close enough".
The other problem here is that a digital plugin can't work until the signal has already been processed by an A/D converter and, as we know, although most companies brag about how "perfect" their conversion is, they all actually sound a bit different, so the ARE affecting the audio in some way. And the whole point of tracking to tape is that there's nothing in the way between the output of the mic pre and the tape machine. Tracking to tape and dumping to digital always sounds better ("different"?) than tracking to digital and mixing to or processing through tape.
Part of that might be the thing about the effects of "stacking" when combining channels...
My theory is that a lot of what we think of as the real sound of tape is time based. I think the fact that you don’t have any of that intersample distortion, your printing that whole wave form. My guess is it just sounds more natural to our brains and you can’t do that in PCM. I first started thinking this when I was playing with the DBX delta modulation system and compared it to PCM and tape, it didn’t bring all the stuff modern Sims do but it just had that same feel as tape had.
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Post by johneppstein on May 24, 2019 11:49:20 GMT -6
Maybe, but there are already companies with a lot of experience that are already doing emulations of that machine.
IMO the devil, as usual, is in the details. There are a lot of subtleties that need to be identified and analyzed and most companies would probably see the law of diminishing returns setting in. Actually I think that's the reason that so many emulation plugins are rated as being 80% to 90% there, which those selling the product clearly regard as "close enough".
The other problem here is that a digital plugin can't work until the signal has already been processed by an A/D converter and, as we know, although most companies brag about how "perfect" their conversion is, they all actually sound a bit different, so the ARE affecting the audio in some way. And the whole point of tracking to tape is that there's nothing in the way between the output of the mic pre and the tape machine. Tracking to tape and dumping to digital always sounds better ("different"?) than tracking to digital and mixing to or processing through tape.
Part of that might be the thing about the effects of "stacking" when combining channels...
My theory is that a lot of what we think of as the real sound of tape is time based. I think the fact that you don’t have any of that intersample distortion, your printing that whole wave form. My guess is it just sounds more natural to our brains and you can’t do that in PCM. I first started thinking this when I was playing with the DBX delta modulation system and compared it to PCM and tape, it didn’t bring all the stuff modern Sims do but it just had that same feel as tape had. You could be on to something there!
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Post by christopher on May 24, 2019 15:10:51 GMT -6
DASH was around in the 80's and I was surprised to learned that they weren't being used in the late 90's for the million dollar budgets. I honestly thought all those clear, smooth 90's albums were DASH, when later I learned really it was 996, 499, GP9 etc. I realize now that hybrid has been around since digital started, and was used to stored analog tracks, bouncing cleanly, etc. But for some reason the industry still preferred analog reel to reel when budgets were unlimited (for the stuff I liked anyway). I know the argument today is "those converters back then suck compared to today's converters"... but I have some prosumer level 90s ADAT's and I'd have to be extra super alert if I hoped to pass a blind test between those and today's stuff. The ADAT's might actually win vs some of today's cheaper interfaces, I need to shoot them out at some point. So I don't really buy that argument. I also don't buy the electronic circuit argument, while its partially true, I know its not the whole truth: when my Studer started having transport issues I still ran all signals in/out the Studer modules to give them some character. And it gave me a cool vintage analog sound.. but not the tape sound at all unfortunately, not anything close. Here's a quote from a tech.. "Digital 'tests' and 'specs' very well in almost all audio tests, much better than Analog Tape recorders ! But go and try recording a square wave in digital at say about 8 kHz... With analog you'll get a distorted but visable square wave on an oscilliscope... but with digital you'll get a nice sine wave... meaning you'll get a completely different wave-form !!!! That's like 1000 % distortion with Digital !!! But who cares, they are all listening on Ear buds !" source: www.analogrules.com/No_Tape_Recorder.html I think to me that pretty much sums up why I can't get the tape sound I'm after any other way unfortunately
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Post by ragan on May 24, 2019 16:03:01 GMT -6
DASH was around in the 80's and I was surprised to learned that they weren't being used in the late 90's for the million dollar budgets. I honestly thought all those clear, smooth 90's albums were DASH, when later I learned really it was 996, 499, GP9 etc. I realize now that hybrid has been around since digital started, and was used to stored analog tracks, bouncing cleanly, etc. But for some reason the industry still preferred analog reel to reel when budgets were unlimited (for the stuff I liked anyway). I know the argument today is "those converters back then suck compared to today's converters"... but I have some prosumer level 90s ADAT's and I'd have to be extra super alert if I hoped to pass a blind test between those and today's stuff. The ADAT's might actually win vs some of today's cheaper interfaces, I need to shoot them out at some point. So I don't really buy that argument. I also don't buy the electronic circuit argument, while its partially true, I know its not the whole truth: when my Studer started having transport issues I still ran all signals in/out the Studer modules to give them some character. And it gave me a cool vintage analog sound.. but not the tape sound at all unfortunately, not anything close. Here's a quote from a tech.. "Digital 'tests' and 'specs' very well in almost all audio tests, much better than Analog Tape recorders ! But go and try recording a square wave in digital at say about 8 kHz... With analog you'll get a distorted but visable square wave on an oscilliscope... but with digital you'll get a nice sine wave... meaning you'll get a completely different wave-form !!!! That's like 1000 % distortion with Digital !!! But who cares, they are all listening on Ear buds !" source: www.analogrules.com/No_Tape_Recorder.html I think to me that pretty much sums up why I can't get the tape sound I'm after any other way unfortunately Wait, why are we claiming that a square wave from a digital source will transform into a sine wave? I’m missing something.
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Post by christopher on May 24, 2019 17:15:45 GMT -6
You can turn anything into a sinewave, since sine is the fundamental waveform. Sort of like an atom or a ray of light - for tone.. all wave shapes are made of a bunch of sinewaves summed together. Digital exploits this fact to get a a nice sound with a low tech resolution that coincides with our hearing by using low pass filters. One before AD conversion.. and a low pass upon DA conversion. Im not sure what his test measurement is.. he’s probably talking about a 44.1 sample rate, and an analog low pass filter on a DAC that might chop the first harmonic at 16k? (Or maybe even with harmonic it still looks sine shape) So you’d see a 8k sine on a scope if that happened. He did write that comment over 10 years ago I think.,
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Post by ragan on May 24, 2019 17:49:51 GMT -6
You can turn anything into a sinewave, since sine is the fundamental waveform. Sort of like an atom or a ray of light - for tone.. all wave shapes are made of a bunch of sinewaves summed together. Digital exploits this fact to get a a nice sound with a low tech resolution that coincides with our hearing by using low pass filters. One before AD conversion.. and a low pass upon DA conversion. Im not sure what his test measurement is.. he’s probably talking about a 44.1 sample rate, and an analog low pass filter on a DAC that might chop the first harmonic at 16k? (Or maybe even with harmonic it still looks sine shape) So you’d see a 8k sine on a scope if that happened. He did write that comment over 10 years ago I think., I’ll read the linked thing. It sounded like the claim being made was that if you use a digital function generator to generate a square wave and measure it on an analog scope you’d see a sine wave instead of a square wave.
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Post by johneppstein on May 24, 2019 20:07:27 GMT -6
DASH was around in the 80's and I was surprised to learned that they weren't being used in the late 90's for the million dollar budgets. I honestly thought all those clear, smooth 90's albums were DASH, when later I learned really it was 996, 499, GP9 etc. I realize now that hybrid has been around since digital started, and was used to stored analog tracks, bouncing cleanly, etc. But for some reason the industry still preferred analog reel to reel when budgets were unlimited (for the stuff I liked anyway). I know the argument today is "those converters back then suck compared to today's converters"... but I have some prosumer level 90s ADAT's and I'd have to be extra super alert if I hoped to pass a blind test between those and today's stuff. The ADAT's might actually win vs some of today's cheaper interfaces, I need to shoot them out at some point. So I don't really buy that argument. I also don't buy the electronic circuit argument, while its partially true, I know its not the whole truth: when my Studer started having transport issues I still ran all signals in/out the Studer modules to give them some character. And it gave me a cool vintage analog sound.. but not the tape sound at all unfortunately, not anything close. Here's a quote from a tech.. "Digital 'tests' and 'specs' very well in almost all audio tests, much better than Analog Tape recorders ! But go and try recording a square wave in digital at say about 8 kHz... With analog you'll get a distorted but visable square wave on an oscilliscope... but with digital you'll get a nice sine wave... meaning you'll get a completely different wave-form !!!! That's like 1000 % distortion with Digital !!! But who cares, they are all listening on Ear buds !" source: www.analogrules.com/No_Tape_Recorder.html I think to me that pretty much sums up why I can't get the tape sound I'm after any other way unfortunately While I do agree in general with this, after direct personal experience dealing with Michael Gore I would take anything he says with an entire carton of salt.
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Post by johneppstein on May 24, 2019 20:11:59 GMT -6
DASH was around in the 80's and I was surprised to learned that they weren't being used in the late 90's for the million dollar budgets. I honestly thought all those clear, smooth 90's albums were DASH, when later I learned really it was 996, 499, GP9 etc. I realize now that hybrid has been around since digital started, and was used to stored analog tracks, bouncing cleanly, etc. But for some reason the industry still preferred analog reel to reel when budgets were unlimited (for the stuff I liked anyway). I know the argument today is "those converters back then suck compared to today's converters"... but I have some prosumer level 90s ADAT's and I'd have to be extra super alert if I hoped to pass a blind test between those and today's stuff. The ADAT's might actually win vs some of today's cheaper interfaces, I need to shoot them out at some point. So I don't really buy that argument. I also don't buy the electronic circuit argument, while its partially true, I know its not the whole truth: when my Studer started having transport issues I still ran all signals in/out the Studer modules to give them some character. And it gave me a cool vintage analog sound.. but not the tape sound at all unfortunately, not anything close. Here's a quote from a tech.. "Digital 'tests' and 'specs' very well in almost all audio tests, much better than Analog Tape recorders ! But go and try recording a square wave in digital at say about 8 kHz... With analog you'll get a distorted but visable square wave on an oscilliscope... but with digital you'll get a nice sine wave... meaning you'll get a completely different wave-form !!!! That's like 1000 % distortion with Digital !!! But who cares, they are all listening on Ear buds !" source: www.analogrules.com/No_Tape_Recorder.html I think to me that pretty much sums up why I can't get the tape sound I'm after any other way unfortunately Wait, why are we claiming that a square wave from a digital source will transform into a sine wave? I’m missing something. What you're missing is the Nyquist cutoff filter.
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Post by johneppstein on May 24, 2019 20:17:46 GMT -6
You can turn anything into a sinewave, since sine is the fundamental waveform. Sort of like an atom or a ray of light - for tone.. all wave shapes are made of a bunch of sinewaves summed together. Digital exploits this fact to get a a nice sound with a low tech resolution that coincides with our hearing by using low pass filters. One before AD conversion.. and a low pass upon DA conversion. Im not sure what his test measurement is.. he’s probably talking about a 44.1 sample rate, and an analog low pass filter on a DAC that might chop the first harmonic at 16k? (Or maybe even with harmonic it still looks sine shape) So you’d see a 8k sine on a scope if that happened. He did write that comment over 10 years ago I think., I’ll read the linked thing. It sounded like the claim being made was that if you use a digital function generator to generate a square wave and measure it on an analog scope you’d see a sine wave instead of a square wave. No, not a digital function generator. It's if you feed a sine wave into an ADC that's what comes out after the DAC conversion - on an old system that uses Nyquist filters right below the Nyquist point.
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Post by ragan on May 24, 2019 20:57:00 GMT -6
The quote was vague and didn’t mention anything about the filtering but that’s probably what the guy being quoted was meaning to get at.
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Post by chessparov on May 25, 2019 15:45:07 GMT -6
Better sine language would help. Chris
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Post by jdc on May 26, 2019 16:02:26 GMT -6
My theory is that a lot of what we think of as the real sound of tape is time based. I think the fact that you don’t have any of that intersample distortion, your printing that whole wave form. My guess is it just sounds more natural to our brains and you can’t do that in PCM. I first started thinking this when I was playing with the DBX delta modulation system and compared it to PCM and tape, it didn’t bring all the stuff modern Sims do but it just had that same feel as tape had. I think this is brilliant
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