Can plugins sufficiently do the "tape" thing?

I wish I still had the sessions somewhere... When I was working at a recording school years ago, the CLASP guys came in and gave a whole spiel and sold them on the system for the room with the massive SSL console and studer tape machine. Once it was all installed (this was early on, but there was a magical dance you had to do in a certain order after sacrificing a born again virgin to the gods of misery to get CLASP to work right every time), I went in with a few people and recorded a whole song to the Studer at 30 IPS. We were also able to record in tandem strait to digital at the same time, so we had all the tape tracks as well as the digital tracks. Rushed through a song, did a quick mix on the console that was a bit over the top on purpose, and went back and forth a few times between digital and tape. It was an extremely small difference, the ever so slight noise floor on the tape tracks was always a give away. The techs there kept that studer in great shape, and 30 IPS might as well been digital most of the time.

A few months later we tried the same thing at 15 IPS, much more noticeable. At that point, you would need to make very different mix decisions track to track. The settings that worked mixing the digital tracks did not work as well when switching to tape. Especially on drums, it would have been much harder to get the digital tracks to compress and EQ the same way as the tape tracks were reacting. I don't even mean that from a "the tape sounded better" perspective, it was just different enough to where you would have to process them different to get similar results.

There's plenty of sessions where I stack the tape emulation plugins with my UA Apollo setup. I've got a bunch of cleaner presets on the UAD Studer plugin that I throw on during tracking destructively. Come mix time, I'll throw the UAD Ampex over the master bus and add some tapey/harmonic stuff to individual tracks. There's some tape plugins like the Waves J37 that I love because of how extreme they can be. I'm almost always running shakers and tambourines through the J37 really hard because I like the distortion and slight high end roll off. The UAD plugins, at least in my opinion, are more "realistic" as far as my experience has been working with tape. I like the subtle results from stacking it in a clean way throughout the process. I thought the UAD Studer Plugin sounded eerily close to the Studer machine I worked on, and I did quite a few tests out of curiosity. We also had an ATR machine in another room, and quite honestly I never got along with that machine very well. I also didn't find the UAD version to sound very close to the real one, but ended up preferring what the UAD plugin did by a long shot. Who knows what variables contributed to all of that, there could have been issues with that machine (which I doubt given who was maintaining it) or it could be as simple as my specific opinion and preferences. Who knows....

I don't think there's any point in trying to figure out what plugins are the closest to the real thing. I've been lucky enough to work a fair amount on nicer machines over the years, but I'm nowhere close to being an expert on this stuff. I've just had enough experiences to where I felt like I formed some valid opinions as far as how I want to work and what I liked and didn't like about "tape world". We all have some sort of convoluted idea in our head of what tape is. That can be anywhere from growing up around it and working on it daily from the start of your career, to just being a fan of music that tends to be recorded that way and having a very nostalgic and visceral connection to the process and the sound of those eras. Neither of those experiences should be more or less valid than the other any more than I like vanilla ice cream more than chocolate. The tape era has been over for a while and has become more or less a color box. You can use it however you want, and what you "think" tape is or isn't doesn't have to align to anyone elses views. I've gotten into the Coil preamps the last few months and fallen in love with the CA-70. To me, running mics through that preamp is pretty much what I've always wanted from the "tape" sound in my head. I almost bought a nice tape machine a couple of times last year, but after using the Coils and being able to run line level stuff through them quiet easily, I had to be honest with myself... I don't think there's a tape machine out there that would do what I want it to do any better than a pair of CA-70's.

That's ended up being the ultimate "tape" thing for me, and I'm really happy with the results. It's obviously not tape, and probably doesn't sound anything like any tape machine out there, but I don't care. Neither should you, which I guess is what I'm trying to say. "Tape" can be whatever you want it to be now, because it was never universal to begin with. It was just a necessity to work around, and as much as people complained about it over the years, it turns out it wasn't all that bad and "perfection" was a little too boring for most people. Humans are destructive by nature, so I'm not at all surprise we all ended up wanting to mangle our audio when it started sounding too good.