2024-12-11 Is it Memorex or Is It Emulation? A listening comparison of tape vs hardware emulation vs software emulation

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It’s 2024 and the audio world lives primarily in the digital domain, but the lust for the good old days of analog remains. Analog tape decks are often desired, but rarely used due to cost and complexity. Audio engineers often turn to tape emulators, either hardware or software, to give them that analog sound.
But what is that good old analog sound? Analog tape has many foibles, not the least of which is ensuring the deck is running at its peak performance. A well setup Ampex, Studer, MCI or Otari multi track will each sound very good, but they will each be different; even if optimized for the same tape. All 4 of these brands have good to great midrange to high frequency response, but the low frequency will be different for each deck and will change between 15IPS and 30IPS. Each will have some distortion from the vagaries of the magnetic material and its interaction with bias and heads as well as sound differences due to different circuit topologies.
In short, it’s a complex set of compromises which have evolved over the few decades where analog tape was the only medium.
Oh, and each instrument is impacted differently. A snare drum might sound great if you really push it onto analog tape, but an acoustic guitar might benefit from a lighter touch.
In contrast, digital recording gives you back pretty much what you sent in. Sending a snare drum harder onto a digital track gives you back a louder snare drum but no difference in character.
Emulators to the rescue!
But how well do these emulators emulate the sound of tape? Matthew & John will play back tracks of a few different instruments which have been recorded onto tape or run through hardware and software emulators for you to hear how well emulators live up to their tape heritage (or not) and we can have a (hopefully) lively discussion about what we hear.