Good informative post.n9 wrote:Saturation can be truly wonderful. If you're asking why people would want to emulate tape I guess my answer is that when tape was a dominant media for recording and reproducing sound many, many very smart and committed people spent many many hours figuring out how to make it sound the best it could possibly sound... with many definitions of what "best" would mean. Engineers spent countless hours and lots of money figuring out how to record symphony orchestras with a great deal of accuracy and high fidelity. Other engineers spent their hours figuring out how to get rock bands to sound big and amazing and hip hop producers figured out how you could push a tape to make a sampled drum loop sound bigger... and the list goes on.
In the 80s and 90s everyone "switched to digital" because of many reasons, but mainly because it was thought that it would "just sound better." Turns out that for a lot of reasons it generally did not sound better, and a lot of the reasons were that engineers had figured out how to create beautiful, resonant sounds out of the idiosyncrasies and nonlinear properties of tape. Tape was not pristine and accurate, maybe, but there were a lot of interesting and effective things that you could do with it.
For me, tape is yet another wonderfully deep way to square off the tops and bottoms of those waveforms. You can drive it a little and get an effect that sounds subtle, but when you turn it off you miss it. You can push it harder and get some truly wild behaviors related to saturating the media itself, the preamps and op amps in the device, to the math that I don't understand that relates to the bias... try pushing a sine wave into a tape machine some time... it is really weird. (...)
