Ha, you read my mind.

These "experts" do not know, that a VU meter can display anything. Before making assumptions about gain staging, one must know what the meter displays. The Kramer Tape, for example, is calibrated to -18 dbFS.

Interestingly some of these people did not understand, that plugins can be enforced to show their aliasing behaviour...
Where gain staging was to be ignored, they claimed it was important, and where it is of utmost importance, they don't know, how to check it...

That's a discussion I hope to get going.

In the current analog hype I have the impression, that anything that smoothes transients, is being hailed as improvement. But what if it is degrading signal quality and not improving it?

What if the analog hw behaviour torwards the signal was completely different?
How many have the ability to compare with a real tape hw?

Many people hailed the native SSL EQ plugin. Who heard, that the SSL EQ plugin was not sounding like the hw? But people believed it was.


I think it would be beneficial, if the discussion about tape-sound could be freed from the purely suggestive and subjective sphere and be based more on verifiable technical parameters.
Similar to the frequency response of loudpseakers, it cannot replace the subjective verdict. But if a loudspeaker has frequency response only down to 60 Hz, it is fair to assume, that it will not be suited to judge bass.

It would be very helpful, to have similar technical measurements available, when it comes to tape plugins.

Everyone. Access Analog (or Mix Analog? I get confused between the 2!) have a couple of tape machines available. I remember running a whole bunch of tracks as well as test tones through it (Urs from U-he had a great "testing kit" he used in the development of Satin, which I can't seem to find anymore), and the results were comparable to most good tape emulations out there. In the end I preferred to stick with plugins because a) I wasn't exactly in love with the sound of that tape machine and b) they afforded me way more control.

As for Waves, if you read about the development of the Kramer Tape (or just read the manual, or just read Bob Olhsson's account of it), you'd know that they really went for it and it was meant as very serious business. To think that they didn't use an oscilloscope would be ridiculous.

I can but I find it a meaningless comparison since there are a lot of other factors involved...no way to take the transformer out of the equation, or in my case the 2-stage tube preamps...that a whole lotta stuff to account for besides the age of the tape, the condition of the heads, the calibration, the basic noise level, etc...

So if the PR claims about the Waves Kramer Tape are true, then there must be good tape machines with analog chains, that show similar characteristics, right?

I am an engineer. I have no problem with any sort of claims. I repeat my question: please show the measurements that support the behaviour of Kramer Tape as real world behaviour and I will change my mind instantly and take back my criticism based on the measurement.

Until that happens, I will trust my and other measurements more than pr claims of a company.


Additionally I also have my ears. If I use my preferred method to test tape plugins, a hard hitting drum loop, I do not hear any of the pleasant tape characteristics. The transients of closed hihats are still piercing the ear.

I don't claim to have a hw tape machine available, but there is a plugin, when I use that, the difference is huge:

The piercing in the transients vanishes (but the kick's transient, like a miracle, becomes even more beautiful), while the whole clhht/ohht/cymbals group starts breathing with the kick, almost like being sidechained to it. Accumulating frequencies in the cymbals group, crying for (dynamic) EQing, go away, as if they are being dynamically EQed. THAT is tape sound.

No fancy pr claims can make these characteristics appear in my ears.

^^ this has been added to my learning notes for future reference. gold .. its gold..

I mentioned strange measurements.
This is one of them making no sense to me:



The DC-filtering is strong and quickly drops to zero. Ok. But then it moves further and goes beyond zero and changes polarity as if it could look into the future and know, where the next flank will appear.

I don't see anyone saying your measurements are wrong - I see people saying they're meaningless without context or explication.

Invasion of the Einsteins!

Well it's not so much PR as it is Bob Olhsson openly and generously sharing some of what had gone on during its development. It's somewhere here in the forums. Going by his account, by the fact that it was a very old 60's tube-powered machine, and just by the sheer quality of some of Waves's older manuals/whitepapers (most of which seem to have actually been watered down now ) https://web.archive.org/web/20111125...lugins/kmt.pdf (Chapter 5 - Appendix), all I'm saying is - you're going to have a hard time convincing me they didn't use some of the most basic audio measurement tools such as oscilloscopes , or that the only thing that matters in modeling such complex vintage machines is how they treat square waves.

The combativeness (and snarky commentary on your screenshots) indicates that you're trying to prove something here - but that's pretty tough to do when you don't state your hypothesis... which leads to people questioning the usefulness of your information.

Only if you want them to remain squared? Check this out to see really quickly how a square wave can warp around because of eq and stuff.

https://sound-au.com/articles/squarewave.htm

Then come back to these photos in this thread and see that they are just screenshots of settings. The way I use Saturn would look a lot like figure12, but it sounds perfect for what I want from it.

But now that we kind of know what Fred is looking for, why not just use a clipper or limiter? Everything else a tape plugin does isn't going to look square enough.

This one looks like a typical 2-way loudspeaker with 12dB/oct crossover playing a square wave. I would guess they process lows and highs separately and use basic IIR filters for the crossover.

The other ones that look close to a square wave but skewed on top, that is due to LF roll off. The top of the square wave would be flat if the plugin passed DC. If you use lower frequency square wave for the test signal the skewing will be more pronounced, and if you use a test signal that is at or below the HP filter your measurement will look almost like a sawtooth.

I guess it has been more than 20 years ago, since I had to calculate LC-circuits, and I never worked with loudspeakers, but wouldn't it be a prerequisite, that some energy was left in the circuit, when the next cycle starts, to show that behaviour?



Correct. I think C3 shows it very well.

Here's another one, which looks strange to me:



As if the plugin would see, that a steep flank was coming and it wants to move into that polarity, and when the flank finally arrives, it has already been rising in that direction.

Looks to me like a "Vintage Tape" that knows what the future will bring.

The energy that is left in the circuit is called ringing and it's normal for HP and LP filters. In filters with super high Q (what audio guys know as resonance) the ringing can easily go on for more than a whole cycle. If you switch your square wave display to impulse response display (same data just displayed in time domain as opposed to frequency domain) you will see the transient being spread in time due to LP filtering. It's how filters work in analog and digital domain. If you want to have a perfect time domain response with no ringing, you have to delay the whole signal to the longest acceptable ringing and reassemble the individual sine wave components there. That's how linear phase FIR filters work.

Where do you see a frequency domain? It's an oscilloscope.

so.. i can comment on this one as I use it. what happens if you click GP9 button? my understanding based on their manual... the older tapes attenuate more. the newer ones don't.

maybe this is why i like the sound of the 99 the most for lo-fi? when i first git into the ecosystem.. i didn't really know what i was doing.. and just kept input controls sane. then i read up, and started driving the inputs and started to hear the difference. people said the 24 was best. but i disagree. the little guys sound better.

Taupe is my personal favourite.
It is the only plugin among all I have tried over the years, that creates that gentle tape sound.
It smoothens the nasty transients without creating dullness. Quite the opposite. It makes hihats shine and short, but not snappy.
Something I am missing from all algorithmic plugins.

Interestingly, the algorithmic plugins which I like more, show a similar behaviour to Taupe in the time domain: clean and fast rising slope and a pronounced exponential drop of any dc voltage (reminds me of a small time constant in a RC circuit - small in comparison to the long time constants of other plugins).

Maybe I was simply not capable to find the correct settings with Saturn or Satin, but that tape feeling never appears. Switching on Taupe and Boom! It's there.

I just checked Taupe. It's 240 euros. My guess is, when on sale, it will be 120 euro's. That's a lotta dough compared to AudioThing or IKM tapes suite. Maybe it's for pro engineers? "You get what you pay for". Maybe it's not. Who knows for sure?

I don't have any engineering knowledge and I don't really understand what should be an expected behaviour ,so with all the risk this tread's bearing , may I ask, what should we look for in the oscilloscope ?

Should the test remain close to the square-wave or should it look something like this Taupe pic ?

I did however found out that a lot of these tape plugins are introducing pre-ringing simply by running kicks with big and sharp transients...I was tripping that I'm hearing pre-ringing on the whole mix when I thrown a tape plugin, and ran it on a sharp kick and voila, ringing before transients similar to linear phase eq...

it seems this has been answered in a few posts on here. different view and perspectives.

I have participated in a few threads like this and it's fascinating stuff.. but it all ultimately comes down to what sounds good to you? Does it give you the sound you are looking for? And of course, how much are you willing to pay?

FWIW.. when I started with DAWs, I got a bunch of stuff and didn't really use it and just kept GAS'ing my way ahead. After teaching myself some stuff and reading a bunch of stuff on audio engineering (I am primarily a musician so my dog in this race is I just want to learn to get the sounds I am looking for) , I revisited the tools I already had and found out I was able to get a lot more mileage out of them than I initially had when I started.

Yes, sadly it is really expensive. To me the decision was easy, because this was like a Heureka moment for tape plugins. But I am sure they had a demo phase.