High quality tape emulations promise the mojo that we miss, or maybe the sound we want to discover. Can IK Multimedia’s T-RackS Tape Machine Collection solve sterility and give us the elixir of analogue? Luke Goddard takes it for a spin to find out.

Why Tape Machines?

For most of the last century, analogue recording and playback was the only technology available, and as a result many of us associate the “tape sound” either with a lot of the music that we choose to listen to, or with recorded sound itself. Although DAWs take away a lot of the expense and maintenance of having to run on tape, for some its sound is just hard to beat. Enter the T-RackS Tape Machine Collection…

Using T-RackS Tape Machine Collection

So what does real tape do to the sound? I would describe it as slightly smearing transients and adding some extra harmonic interest that lends a pleasing density to sounds. The effect with moderate “real world” settings should only ever be very subtle; after all, engineers spent decades very nearly succeeding in getting tape systems’ performance to be near-perfect.

That said, to demonstrate the effect, you can hear for yourself In the video how T-RackS Tape Machine Collection sounds when pushed quite hard. The collection comes with four tape formulations, two multitrack machines for tracking and mixing, as well as two stereo machines for mixing down to, but of course the beauty is you can use whichever you want on whatever you like. I went with tradition and opted for the multitrack Studer A80 MkII on channels with the stereo Ampex 440B across the mix.

I opted for the 250 formula tape on both machines which has the lowest headroom of the four available options. This was to demonstrate the kind of harmonic enrichment you can enjoy if you dare to use the kind of settings that would have the designers up in arms…

For authenticity, I had the T-RackS Tape Machine plugin first in my processing chain so that it could run “into” any further processing to simulate a proper mixdown. The CPU load with any plugin of this kind can be heavy, so to use T-RackS Tape Machine Collection across many tracks will require a more recent processor and/or track freezing to keep things rolling nicely. My 2.2GHz i7 was happy enough, albeit with only a few instances.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t realise how much I had missed the tape sound until I got to use T-RackS Tape Machine Collection. The whole bundle gives you a big warm analogue hug that is quite addictive, but above all musical, and to my ears authentic as well. There is no tape noise modelled, but personally I’m glad IK multimedia decided to keep one of the best things about digital recording. All in all, a great sounding collection that I’m looking forward to trying not to use on everything.

Head over to IK Multimedia’s website to try out T-RackS Tape Machine Collection for yourself.