Tape Saturation Emulation

By: Rishabh Rajan - Music Production & Technology Faculty

Ever since the audio production world went all digital, there has been a craving for that analog warmth which is associated with using an all analog signal flow along with printing to a multitrack tape recorder. At the same time most people prefer the convenience of digital technology. I could never image life without the undo option. 

Today we can have the best of both worlds with analog emulation and tape saturation plugins. One of my favorite ones is Phoenix II developed by Dave Hill of CraneSong. I find this to be even better than the real thing because with this plugin you can choose how much of that saturation you want. You can even bypass it to compare the result. All this would not be possible with a real multitrack tape recorder. You can add the plugin on all your tracks or just on specific track or on the master buss. 

If you are new to the world of analog emulation, it can be a bit hard to really discern the sound of such plugins. In such situations visualizing things helps a lot. I sent a pure sine wave at 1000Hz through this plugin and in the following frequency spectrum graph you should see what the plugin is adding. 

Normally a sinewave will only register its fundamental frequency on the frequency spectrum graph but here you can clearly see that some additional harmonics have been added. Specifically these are odd harmonics. 

If you want to know more details about how all this works you can read my article reviewing the Phoenix II plugin Phoenix II Review.

The following video gives a demonstration of how this plugin works and what it sounds like.