Have you read the manual, or at least gotten yourself a bit familiar with magnetic-recording technology?plastic wrote: Yeah so why would I want to use a tape plugin, which is by definition a retro sound degradation effect, if I wanted my music to sound better/more pristine?
I want distortion, tape compression, wobbling, etc.
Not a mastering EQ plugin that calls itself "tape emulation".
In our opinion, there were just so many plugins on the market which claim to sound like tape but were just a caricature of it, mainly because they create sheer distortion and overly listening fatigue.
[Side note: run a sine sweep through tape plugins of your choice, trap an analyzer on the output, dial-in various amounts of gain and inspect the harmonics structure change and watch aliasing creep in.
Side note 2: here's a helpful video by Slate's Fabrice:
It doesn't cover the whole story, IMO. Perhaps we should make some educational videos ourselves, at least we might supply our test files and procedures for everyone to see and apply elsewhere.]
A 'tape' product aiming for the instant 'wow' factor doesn't do the studio-tape category any good. It leads to wrong expectations and degrades serious technology to to something like a guitar fuzz stomp box. That is NOT what tape recorders were originally made for. It's half-fine when you're attempting to recreate cheap consumer tape decks, but this in no way applies to pro-audio tape gear.
The latter is what we were after with Satin. In fact, a good studio machine does sound remarkably clean and uncolored, compared to domestic gear. The 'magic' comes in when you multiply these subtleties and, moreover, when you *learned* what to listen for (transients smear, spectral changes, front-to-back localisation, stereo-image alteration etc.). People who never used studio-grade tape recorders might need longer to get a hang on things, but it'll be worth it in the end. At least when one attempts to make things sound better, as opposed to just overcook.
