One of the desirable advantages of analog tape recording is its nonlinearity. When one approaches the maximum amount of signal that the tape can accept, it begins to get “saturated”. This saturation makes the tape react like a limiter might. A limiter that adds a certain amount and colour of distortion, that causes a desirable saturation factor or, “warmth”.
This can be particularly effective sounding on instruments with strong transients such as drums or cold sounding mixes that have been mixed in the computer. Tape helps to homogenise a track by glueing the mix together effortlessly without it sounding like ‘work has be done’. Conversely this glue, can reduce the articulation and stereo separation present in the clinical digital domain, so the right choice has to be made for the programme material.
If you feel tape is the right way to go for your music, our mastering engineers will take a your digital recording and play it back through our high end esoteric analog equipment. Then onto our tape machine, where by it hits tape and then is recorded from the reproduction/playback head (of the tape machine) while simultaneous capturing the mastered track in the digital domain too. This provides two masters of the mix, one tape and one digital version. The digital master can somethings be used for an intro of a track if it has a particualry quiet passage that the inherent tape hiss causes an issue.