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In article writes:

Now the anolog tape devices are dying, because ther are better products.

Actually it started dying because there were cheaper and more
convenient consumer products. There have been little hiccups in the
home tape recording market like back in the '70's when kids would tape
each other's LPs and trade them around, but in general recording isn't
a big deal to the majority of the people who owned tape recorders.
Mostly they played tapes. When CDs came along, there wasn't enough of
a demand to develop a home-grade CD recorder right away, they just
sort of fell out of the computer market, and there are probably more
home made MP3 CDs today than home made Red Book CDs.

The professional recording tape market has always been pretty small,
and has indeed shrunk due to the recent availability of digital
recording equipment that's good enough for a pro to consider it a
viable alternative. But as I said in another post, not everyone can
economically make the switch at any given time.

If you want to recreate the errors, I think it could be done in software
processing digital datastreams.

People keep talking about errors. I wish you wouldn't. Talk about
recreating the sound of tape. But that's difficult to do because it's
difficult to quantify. You can make a level-dependent second and third
harmonic distortion generator, and you can simulate hiss, and plot
output level vs. input level (tape compression) and correlate that
with the distortion, and have different curves for different tape
types, bias level, head gap, and head inductance but as far as I know,
nobody's studied it to that level because emulating the sound of tape
just hasn't been all that important. It's not the only reason why
people use tape - other reasons are equally important.

I'd be curious to know what the golden tape ears think of the tape
simulator on Yamaha's new digital mixer plug-in. It has controls for
tape type and speed, bias, and operating level, as well as a choice of
three different machines. Yamaha often does a very good job of things
that demand a lot of detailed simulation work. But no matter how it
sounds, it still doesn't make operating the machine any easier, in
fact it's more difficult because there are more choices to make -
given that level of control, you can't just say "I'm going to have a
late model Studer with 456 tape biased at 2.5 dB over 0, running at
9 dB over standard operating level" and be done with it. In the
computer world, we don't work that way.

If you do so, don't forget the dropouts, crossover, wow, flutter, hiss,
hum, distortion, misalignment, speed inaccuracy, frequency curve etc. to
get a real "vintage" sound.

All valid points.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

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