2 track reel to reel spotted! Proper old skool
Someone noticed that! Good eye Wheresthedug. I LOVE tape saturation. I love digital recording and my DAW as well.
I've been too busy to post this week so I'll post my aggregated comments tonight. Sorry if this got too long. Before I forget, the KPA gets better every day. I'm thrilled to death with it.
I use tape as an effect to "warm up" a track or to add texture to a track. By "warm up" I mean generate low order harmonics that are musically related to the source. I occasionally bounce tracks through it to get real tape saturation although lately I've been using a couple of VST plugins that sound pretty close. Gem TAPEDESK and Waves Kramer VST are my favorites - I've compared them directly with tape including saturated waveforms and they sound and look ALMOST like tape to me, but not exactly. By using the play head to monitor the recorded sound it's easy to adjust how hard the tape gets slammed and how much saturation effect you get. Once I get the levels right and I like the sound I bounce a track through it using my DAW. Since there's a delay I have to slide the bounced track back in time (to the left) to line up with the source track.
The thing I love about tape distortion is that there are no high order (harsh) harmonics generated. If done properly it can add another dimension to the sound and really "thicken" it up. It's also a great zero attack and zero release time limiter that is almost transparent if used judiciously. My practice is to record everything digitally, then apply tape saturation to those tracks I feel can benefit from it.
My favorite things to apply tape saturation to are bass and vocals. Drums can greatly benefit as well. If I slam tape with a bass track it adds an audible octave above the fundamental as well as strong 3rd and 5th order harmonics, making the sound of the bass much richer and fuller. It also limits the peaks inaudibly. If you record a sine wave you can see the spectrum generated by the tape using an RTA. There's almost nothing above the 5th order harmonic so there's no high frequency "rasp" that sounds objectionable (like the sound a heavily over-driven a tube amp would create). IMO the best sounding recordings were made using analog tape, that is until engineers realized what was missing from digital recordings and started correcting for the "problem" of perfect reproduction by digital recorders. With accurate tape simulation plugins and an awareness of the imperfection of analog tape contributing to the sound of a recording in a positive way, things have gotten better, again IMO.
I actually use a Tascam deck (22-2 or 22-4 not pictured) to bounce tracks through for the tape saturation effect, not the Akai in the photo. The Tascam is a professional deck that has about 25dB of headroom (above 0VU) in the amplifier that drives the record head, which means the tape will distort long before the record head amplifier. In the Akai consumer deck in the photo the record head amp with distort at about 12dB over the 0 VU reference. This prevents it from being able to heavily distort high bias/high output tape. I purchased the Akai so that I could create tape distortion but was disappointed when I tried to use it. The transistors in the record head amp would distort before the tape heavily saturated. Then I did my research and discovered I needed a deck with a lot more headroom. The Tascam will distort the tape as much as I could possibly want to.
The speakers are technically too far apart but I've grown used to it. I don't sense a "hole". However, I plan to mount them to the wall above the monitors to get them ideally spaced for my seating position. Haven't gotten to that yet. The bigger problem IMO are the room reflections and resulting unnatural frequency response. I recently started using ARC, a VST plugin that analyses the room response and applies corrective EQ. It REALLY helps even out the bass in a small rectangular room. The "boominess" is gone! It's definitely preferable to treat the room acoustically, but when you're crammed into a small bedroom it's impossible to get rid of all the reflections, especially the bass. Even with bass traps in every corner the room response will still stink. But ARC helps a lot. It's not very expensive either unless you buy it at the wrong place. It's $100 online and worth every penny IMO. Comes with a microphone that needs phantom power. And no, I have no affiliation with the company that makes it.
The monitors are 43" Samsung 4K TVs. This translates into four 21.5" 1080p monitors "stuck together". At native resolution everything scales to look like it would on a 21.5" 1080p monitor. I love it. There are two computers synced together, one monitor for each, and the computers are networked together to be able to transfer files. I use one computer for playback and processing of all the recorded tracks, and the other computer just to track guitar and bass. By not having more than a few tracks on the computer used for recording guitar, I can run the buffer at 32 samples, running the dry guitar into and back out of an audio interface and then into the KPA. That allows me to record the dry guitar for reamping later if I change my mind about the profile I used, and to record guitar while playing without noticeable latency. Once I record a guitar track I import it into the other computer (that has a large buffer with high latency for the numerous VST effects and tracks) for playback and move on to recording the next guitar/bass track.
I hope somebody has time to read all this or even cares - jeez - I got long winded!