tape sound: medium or machine?
have any of you ever looked at the schematics for a studio tape machine before? i saw some diagrams a few years ago... the machines are full of tons of processing, etc. that was originally there to compensate for the medium... for example, eq stages before or after particular mechanical stages to compensate for unavoidable attenuation of certain frequency regions, etc. and then there's the whole compander-style noise reduction circuits, etc. When you see all of things, it makes you wonder... how much of what we perceive as the "tape sound" is actually the affects of the tape medium itself and how much is from elaborate compression and eq box that is the tape machine?
|