frontleaningrest
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- May 20, 2024
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- #21
yeah i'd never in a million years want to handle a full blown tape machine. to my ears there are a lot of very good distortion emulations but they all suffer from some degree of unavoidable aliasing (especially when i have a lot of tracks running at 44.1 or 48k) which, when my hyperacusis and tinnitus act up, definitely contributes to fatigue. i see my studio gear like an instrument--having it "feel good" definitely helps me work better even if the sound improvement is negligible.As others ITT have noted, DACs and ADCs have been pretty transparent for years now... the past 10 years have not really advanced the state of the art AFAIK.
Also, maybe you just don't have the right analog-style saturator plugin on your master channel. Much easier and cheaper than doing it this way.
If that's the tool that gets you the result you want with a little extra saturation, go for it, but personally I would find it way too much hassle. I once bought an R2R tape machine to do this kind of thing but never ended up actually using it on a track. So at least I applaud your appetite for inconvenience in pursuit of a good mix.
and i really like to abuse my gear, drive things right short of the 0db red. one of my friends who's a mixing engineer calls it the "dirty secret of modern music." it's fun to replicate, and while something like decapitator or taupe or ozone can get close, I am convinced there is some dimensionality lost that analog preserves or somehow recreates. That same friend who is loads smarter than me suspects it has to do with analog equipment mimicking the time domain distortion imparted by air... pretty kooky stuff haha