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Originally Posted by PHILANDDON I'm suprised to learn that tape accentuates the highs, at least according to your chart. I thought tape had the effect of rolling off the highs after around 3Khz. As far as the lows go, is everything under 60Hz gone, or does tape pick some of that up? |
not all highs are created equal. what tape does is soften the headache freqs, 4-6k, and lift the air, 14k and up. remember, it's not just an eq curve, it saturates and thickens things in a very non-linear fashion.
so e.g. strummy acoustics sound great, because not only does the hardness of the steel get rounded, the spiky attack gets compressed in a way that no other box can do. it's extremely natural and doesn't have any sort of grab that makes you think 'compressor!'.
it sounds like you've never worked with a good tape deck, is that the case? many many great minds are continuously working on ways to emulate tape and all it's luscious mystery, but the naked fact remains that only one thing does all the things that tape does, and that's tape. the hedd, the fatso, the portico... these things all come at it in their own way, but there is absolutely nothing in the world like a u47 into a 1073 and a magical voice coming straight off a 2" studer. the depth is larger than life.
i'm not generally a naysayer, so i submit this with all due respect: you will never begin to approach that sort of mojo by eq'ing a track that went straight to digital. you can soften and attenuate the peakiness, you can bump the low mids, you can open the air band, but you cannot make it sound tapey.
the good news is that top flight studers can be had for well under a grand nowadays, so all this magic is, relative to other high end gear, a ridiculous bargain.
gregoire
del ubik