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Is it possible to transfer analog tone and soundstage of vintage reel to reel to digital.

Sam here again. I have a hi-res digital rip of the rolling stones sticky fingers album from an original commercial reel to reel tape from 1971 and the analog warmth and soundstage is as good as it gets to my  ears. loudness war free sound.   https://postimg.cc/rDmzvR80

I realize there are many digital plugins that emulate the sound of analog tape and vinyl, however when I use them in post processing of digital audio I seem to get further away from the sound I'm trying to achieve? Now I may be naive on the subject, but if I want to digitally replicate the sound of vintage analog tape in the digital domain, why not go directly to the source? Heres what I did I extracted 1 second of analog tape sound between tracks and made an impulse file for the convolver dsp filter for foobar2000. I believe it made the digital download sound better, however, I'm not 100% sure.  Here are my audio samples (1) reel to reel (2) commercial digital download (3) commercial digital download with the impulse filter applied. I used replay gain to normalize the volume to 89db for all three samples.

(1) reel to reel (1971) 24/192 http://u.pc.cd/d2qrtalK

(2) commercial digital download flac16/44 2009 remaster http://u.pc.cd/4oditalK

(3)  commercial digital download flac16/44 2009 remaster.impulse applied http://u.pc.cd/99ActalK
guitarsam
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Are you looking in the mirror? You did an excellent job describing yourself. 
roberttdid
534 posts
 
TROLL

Are you looking in the mirror? You did an excellent job describing yourself.

geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
I’m going to do and end run around Mr. Smarty Pants 👖 roberttdid, roberttcan, atdavid, whoever he is and get back on track for just a second, and say that digitally remastered cassettes - they’ve been around like forever - are an excellent compromise between analog and digital. Very high signal to noise ratio, dynamic range, information retrieval !! and capturing much of the analog sound of the original source. The advantage of portable cassette playback - no angry PMs please - is it avoids all or most the pitfalls of CD playback, e.g., expense, power cords, speaker cables, interconnects, AC power, AC ground anomalies, fuses, transformers, Scattered light issues, fluttering disc issues. Having said that, pure analog tape usually has better high frequency performance and is less hard sounding that “digalog” type cassettes.
roberttdid
534 posts
 
Only a TROLL would post something about cassettes that was irrelevant and bordering on illogical when the topic is:

Is it possible to transfer analog tone and soundstage of vintage reel to reel to digital.

We get it geoffkait, it is all about you. It has never been about audio.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
It’s the tape, stupid. Try to keep up. You’re the one who’s making it about me. Thanks 😊 
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