u-he Satin or Slate VTM?

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[hibidy]

I don't think there's anything wrong with what i asked - given the situation here

There isn't. Flies attracted and all that.....

[Urs]

But could it be that your model of formulae isn't exactly the right one? Note that this is normal question i am not trying to "say" anything and i am perfectly fine with Satin.

Hmmm, I think a wrong formular would lead to wrong behaviour - which would have become apparent during the development.

If you look into Satin's manual, there's a chain of modules that makes a tape machine. Each of these modules work in a defined way, and its effect on a signal can be tested. One can look at each part in isolation, similar to looking at envelopes, oscillators and filters in a synth. I'm quite sure, if one of the parts were broken, the measurements would be off.

The good thing is, there's a lot of literature and there are lots of standards about tape.

[J4R1O]

Theo, any Slate VTM presets for Satin yet?

[electro]

U-he should post a multitracked A/B mix tutorial with a real tape machine and Satin. High resolution .wav files RMS matched.

[bmanic]

I think all these arguments if Satin sounds like real tape or not can only be answered by ABX sound testing. Anything else is just a bunch of chat. Even then people will have their own opinions, but at least there is some science and the results are out in the open.

Oh, I waited for this.
"It's only right if we do a triple blind ABX test".

Up until this day, that's still the most stupid thing. Because you're still listening subjectively. If you expect something to be "that" (like a specific tape machine), then you intentionally rule out everything else as bad.

Eh? An ABX test is never a stupid thing.. nor does it have ANYTHING to do with subjectivity. That's the whole point. ABX is just what it says.. you have the audio output source A and audio output source B and compare it to X and then have to tell which of these corresponds to X.

What does it tell you? It tells you if you can hear the difference between A and B.

Most people seem to do the ABX tests wrong too.. it's not enough to do it 10 times in a row.

No. You need to do 10 sessions of 10 times in a row, for most accurate results you need to rest your ears/brain in between so spread it out over a whole day or a few days.

Then pool the results and look at the data.

Cheers!
bManic

[Urs]

U-he should post a multitracked A/B mix tutorial with a real tape machine and Satin. High resolution .wav files RMS matched.

Well, I'm sure someone unbiased will post something like that once... if we post it ourselves it'll be considered "mixed in our favour", hence it would not have a convincing effect on the doubtful.

[bmanic]

.. and as usual I see Shy is causing havoc with his typical "this doesn't sound like the real deal" rant. Well he is completely entitled to his opinion. In my opinion he is the archetypal audio snob of this digital era. There are always a few of them on each audio forum. Shy is the one on KvR.

He does usually have some good points though so it's not all just fluff and silly out of context whack.

To me Satin has a lot of tape elements to it. Is it perfect? Of course not, nothing is.. However, it does process audio in a way that resembles tape just the way I would use it for, especially when not driving it that hard. The transient smearing and high frequency limiting for one are the most obvious. The cross-talk and general "this makes purely digital signals sound more 'real'" thing is spot on in my opinion. Just by running a whole bunch of Satin instances on some of my tracks makes it much easier to mix them together. The glue that happens is automatic and very pleasing. I have to use less compression, less EQ and less fiddling with levels to get things to sit in the mix.

What I don't think Satin is doing quite as well as I was hoping for is the way it saturates at extreme input levels. It's wow&flutter isn't quite as convincing either. At subtle levels he wow&flutter is really useful and nice but if you want to create your own wobbly 80's drumloop collection which is smashed to bits on an abused tape machine where the reels are misaligned and all banged up.. you can't really achieve that with Satin, at least not as well as on some of the competition. I'd also like the possibility of turning down the noise floor by at least 40dB more. Why? Because if I run Satin as the first insert of a long list of plugins I easily end up having the noise floor at audible levels due to a lot of other processing down the line. Now multiplying this with 10 to 30 instances and it can get real noisy. Sure, one can start gating the noise away but sometimes I just want that "digital tape" thing without the noise. I just want to use the transient smearing capabilities and nothing else.

But anyhow, the only thing that really matters is, does it sound good? Yes. Yes it does. It sounds amazing in my opinion! Frankly I couldn't care less if it wasn't even called a tape emulation. If U-He had called it "The Betterizer!" I would have praised it just as much.

At the current asking price it's also incredible value for money.

Cheers!
bManic

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Genetic_Junk]

What I don't think Satin is doing quite as well as I was hoping for is the way it saturates at extreme input levels. It's wow&flutter isn't quite as convincing either. At subtle levels he wow&flutter is really useful and nice but if you want to create your own wobbly 80's drumloop collection which is smashed to bits on an abused tape machine where the reels are misaligned and all banged up.. you can't really achieve that with Satin, at least not as well as on some of the competition.

Which competitors better model the extreme saturation and wow&flutter?

[sascha]

U-he should post a multitracked A/B mix tutorial with a real tape machine and Satin. High resolution .wav files RMS matched.

We will do video tutorials ourselves, as soon as we find the time to do so.
But then we will put the focus on getting to know the software, the idea behind it, its feature set and - hopefully - its creative potential.

What we won't do is doing an A/B shootout. Mimicing a specific device was never our intention, so we leave that up for others.
[We provide several A827 presets but more as a happy accident, since one of our testers (Riccardo Pasini) happened to do recordings on an 827-24ch at that time and kindly offered some in-depth 'reality check'. My null tests revealed that my somewhat reckless textbook approach worked surprisingly well, but overall it didn't matter much to us, so we didn't stir it up more.]

After all, we don't feel like being pulled to court and having to defend ourselves. It's still us who decide on how we present our software. We're open for proposals as long as they don't sound mandatory. We're a bunch of dedicated individuals with an unbowed sense for artistic freedom, and that's what defines our products.

[sascha]

It's wow&flutter isn't quite as convincing either.

If you can provide us with more info on what your 'ideal' w&f is like (isn't it funny...? ), we're all ears.
More 'scrape flutter'?
More random/worn-out?
Anything else? Let us know.