This is the most comprehensive UA A800 video I've yet seen. I've had it almost a year now and didn't know about the relationship between some of its functions. This really opens up the usability for me. Thank you for this, and yes more please ☺🙏
the 900 is BASF 900 ... I never really used it but people claimed it had better top end, and vocals sounded better on it.. IDK... I used GP9 extensively at plus 9, 30ips, like 2.5 over bias.. ish.. (I think) .. You could still hit it hot and get almost a vari mu sounding compression. Enjoying the channel BTW.. 🍻
Great video as usual. Good explanation of real analogue tape recording. I have several comments and info about some of the shortcomings of real multitrack tape machines if anyone is interested. I worked at a studio (with 2 rooms) from 1982 until about '94 that had an A800 and two MCI JH24. Throughout that time almost every session worked at 30IPS (mostly with Dolby A noise reduction), Ampex (much later called Quantegy) 456 and NAB curve (always). In my early years, I wore out the knees of my jeans from kneeling, calibrating the machines several times a week. It was a massive time consuming hassle (carried out by the house engineers and assistants at our studio rather than maintenance dept). If a client brought in tapes to overdub, the machine would be totally re-aligned to match the 1kHz and 10kHz tones recorded at the top of their tape, both in repro and sync - then record aligned (including bias adjustment) using a blank bit of the tape that came in. (Not) funny story: An assistant working there before me once accidentally allowed the machine to run on from the blank bit (leadered up top and tail with plastic non magnetic tape) with all tracks in record onto the intro of the first song on the tape! No undo and seldom safety copies... Often the alignment tones would swing back and forth over a dB or two on the VU meters, generally caused by the tape weaving up and down a tiny bit - either on the original record machine or ours. This made me think about the erase head having a bad effect on the tracks adjacent to the one(s) you were recording on as well as the level moving randomly about. The Studer had a superior tape path and was much better built than the MCI (I remember being told that the A800 cost about the same as my house in London at that time!). However, I think the MCIs on a good day could sound better than the Studer, possibly because the electronic design was simpler. Our house maintenance guy was a bit of an MCI expert. This may seem astonishing - a couple of times he removed the heads and ground off the flat spots to get them back to the correct profile - the Whitesea machine could do with that but I can't imagine anyone daring to try sanding them with no replacements available! The ONLY time that the machines would be set to repro was during mixing or the occasional playback, otherwise of course they would remain in sync mode for overdubbing or 'comping'. It was very common to record several takes of a part (especially lead vocals) on different tracks, then compile them (with a patch from one track to another) making the overdub second generation and already degraded by the sound of the sync playback. While recording, I was generally disappointed that the sound became degraded and noisy. I was particularly appalled by the crunch added to a tambourine or hats recorded at any more than -10VU. I don't miss tape at all, especially as a plug in can now give you just the 'good stuff' from the real thing. Why anyone would want to add noise like tape makes zero sense to me. And seldom mentioned - crosstalk between tracks wasn't great - especially a problem on track 23 next to the timecode on track 24. I could go on much more about all of this but this is a ludicrously long comment already. Don't get me started on the massive hassle of a 48 track mix with two machines synchronised!
It's always been a thing in analog recording that tambourines barely register on the VU meters and so you're in distortion territory very quickly. Better to not even look at the meter in that case.
You explain the impact that the different parameters have on each other better than anyone or anywhere I've ever heard. It is one of the greatest plugins ever, and I use it all the time.
Just finished with a demo of the A800, and yeah, I'll definitely be getting it when it goes on sale again. Really great plugin. The ATR-102 mastering tape machine is a winner as well.
I love your videos. It's so funny watching the A800 plug-in, I used to have to line these up ...hell...the the misery of feeding a kick drum to tape and listening to it off the repro head, whilst trying to get a level that didn't hiss like hell and had a transient !! ...well I LOVE digital
This is perhaps the best overview I've found on tape technology and software emulation. The UAD A800 is an excellent lab for folks wanting to explore the technology imho.
This video was absolutely fascinating. I was just wanting to check out the plugin itself, and was blown away by the fact that he has that R2R machine. Very interesting, very cool, and very well done!
You're one of the best, man. You should talk about the relationship between cutting to the Studer and mixing down to the Ampex (if you haven't already in another video). That was the super sauce back in the day. I hear... I'm not that old lol.
That's a great vid man. Would be cool to see like 60 minutes talking about all these settings inside studer in order to learn all of these. From this point it's cool to know what these knobs are doing but will be much cooler to know when and why apply them.
Thank you very much for this. I got the Universal Audio Studer A800 plugin some time back but I haven't used it much so far but after your intro to it I feel ready to use it more. I did try some of the presets and was quite impressed by them, I guess one can use them as a starting point to creating one's own.
Bro u neva Miss!!!!! thank you for explaining the tape parameters OMG thanks alot. i run the ATR 102 and i love it and everything u spoke on each parameter i thought but wasnt to sure i just went with my ears and i now know i was right. except for the bias i now understand. thanks again
The VU meter is actually not just for looks at all. It's a guide for gain staging for those that aren't used to using a plugin like this. They are using either K14 or -18dbfs metering but I can't remember which off the top of my hat. For those that don't know what that means, K14 means that 0 on the VU is actually peaking at digital -14, so what Bob Katz did with the K14 was try to curb the loudness war and give us 14DB room in our gain staging. The other popular one is -18DBFS VU meter calibration, which you would think is the same thing but with -18 rather than -14, but it's not, not at all, there's a lot less headroom in fact but the general gist of the -18 spec is to peak max at 0 db on the VU meter that is calibrated to the -18 spec, and you'll have enough headroom on your tracks. But with the -18 spec this can be as little as 2 or 3 DB in some cases (heavily compressed sounds) whereas with the K14 spec you always gain 14DB of headroom as the meter is simply shifted down by 14DB. It's as simple as that. Sorry for the meter lesson but for those who might need help using UAD's metering, I thought this might be useful. I will go ahead and try the Studer plugin now and come back and let you all know which one of those two standards it uses. Personally, I use VUMT deluxe by Klanghelm to do all my gain staging using the VU -18dbfs calibration standard. I have found it works very well for pretty much everything. What UAD is saying here is that for just a subtle "track to tape" mojo feel, have the needle hitting about 0 on the VU. They are trying to provide a simple use case that "just sounds good" for everything.
Hi! Thank you for this video which has the magical power of connecting younger generations to older ones (and I'm 52). I think the calibration explanation @ 8'34" is a bit blurry: back in the day if you had a given reference fluxivity and you wanted more signal printed to your working tape, you would first calibrate the repro head to read LESS decibels on the VU meters. Then you would match that by calibrating your record head to print MORE signal in order for the VU meters to show 0 dB. I'm sure you know all this because you have an MCI back there. I just thought it was good to mention to preserve information that otherwise would will be lost in a few years. That would be sad. Thanks again!
Thank you for uploading such video. It is very comprehensive and explanatory. I wonder how much time a newbie has to spend to learn working with a real tape machine. Also I guess, when you work with different albums let's say, you would need different calibration.
Man!! Good video, commentary and plugin. :) Personally, I've been enjoying mixing/matching various 'analogue' emulations of things. It took me years to realize, that since I was born in the 1950's, that analogue 'impression' is inside of me. I love the sound of pristine digital audio, but I certainly do remember the sounds of things back in the day (some of which was not so 'beautiful', but we worked around it as best we could). 🙂💙
Great video tutorial! Please can you do more UAD pluggins 🙏🏼 *love the recording you use there as the ex😅, the intro has lovely CAN vibes, especially the rhythm section.
Thanks so much for this. I have a noob question, never having worked in an analog studio... From tracking to mastering, in general, how many times is an audio signal printed to tape? My guess is 3 - once at the tracking stage, once at the mixing stage and once for the master? Or if you only had one of an analog box and it's mono, would one channel get printed twice? Or do you print just one channel and then the other using the sync? Sorry if these seem like stupid questions.
Great Tutorial ❤❤❤ if you want to try some of the most loved on gearspace, and I second most, IK Tapes are insane, Taipei is awesome, Taupe you have tried and don't like, and Tapeface are all special to me. There's a bunch of Nebula that's also super great, but I don't think you'd do that. Lastly Ampex 102 from uad is also amazing.
Great as usual! Only a question: what do you think about tape emulation gear such as Rupert Neve 542? Do you think it’s worth having a couple of them in 500 series? Have you ever thought of making some comparison between plugins, phisical tape emus and real tape machines? thanks!
Would love to see your input on the engineering side on the recordings of Pink Floyd. Especially the ones that used and abused tape machines, recording technics and all the great things that they CREATED to achieve those espectacular sounds.
900 is recording the masters Sm900 (Ex Basf). i have all formula tapes for my studer a80 (456,911,GP9,RMG900 etc) and 900 is the one i like the most. Also i have compared the original BASF 911 with the modern one from RTM and i prefer the new one in terms of sound
Interresting video. Noob question: did there also exist chrome and metal based studio tapes or where these only ferro based? How do these professional tape machine tape formulations relate to consumer compact cassette formats? Some commercial audio cassettes in the 80’s and 90’s where chrome tapes but where often duplicated with a type 1 normal tape bias. The chrome aspect was often used as selling point of audio quality to the consumer.
Sorry for off-topic but: I would be really interested to hear what a gearhead like you has to say about the MBSI Console Strip. You know your way around analog equipment and EQs. Maybe there will be another video?
What I am curious is how the Struder compares to the oxide tape. As Oxide comes with analog classics that came with the volt interfaces --- I think Struder is/was available for a 30 day trial or something. I so like the oxide just wondering how the sound is differnet on these. I am guessing you know this already - Repro probably means "reproduction" Re pro "Short for Reproduction, the repro function in tape recorders allows for the playback of all tracks, including those that are currently being recorded. The way this works is through the use of a separate repro head. The repro head of a tape machine is generally only capable of playback (not recording) and is optimized as such. In the earlier days of tape recorders the repro head was the only head on a tape machine capable of full fidelity playback. It usually has its own set of corresponding electronics in the machine that can also be optimized for playback. Also important is the positioning of the head, which is after the other tape heads along the tape path. Since the repro head is last in the series, the engineer can monitor off of this head even while recording on another head, which means it’s possible to literally monitor the actual results of the recorded (and played back) signal on the tape. This is sometimes also referred to as confidence monitoring. The only caveat is that the signal one hears is delayed by the length of time it takes a particular point on the tape to travel from the head where it was recorded over to this separate repro head. This distance is usually not much more than an inch and a half, so if the tape were moving at 15 ips the delay would be about a tenth of a second." I am guessing GP9 stands for General purpose 9 speed???? However the GP9 is higher in distortion at output levels 12dB. GP9 has much more complex dependency of distortion on, output level, bias and wavelength I AM WRONG GP9 was and still is regarded as one of the best tapes of all time. The GP stood for Grand Master Platinum (remember that the previous TOTL tape was #499 and had the moniker "Gold" attached to it.) and the 9 standsfor the specfic 3m tape formula # 9
