Thanks Nick!
Coming to a theater near you? If so, I'm in!
This kinda reminds me of a discussion that took place at AES in SF regarding the sound of tape.
A tape manufacturer asked the audience to explain why folks would want to buy his tape to bounce digital recordings through and add the distortions that the analog media gives the sound.
He wondered why engineers don't simply change the eq/compression to make the same changes to the sound.
Well, if he was looking for a lively discussion, he certainly succeeded!
I'm usually pretty quiet at these workshops, being a total hack and just beginning to learn what my fellow attendees have known for years (or decades), but I couldn't resist giving my 2 cents worth.
"It's not as simple as eq or compression." I said and many others elaborated on what they could hear in their own studios on their own projects (many of them still track with tape).
Of course, this was a workshop on tape so the speaker was preaching to the choir but the discussion of this one topic filled the remainder of the time and quite a few folks stayed after discussing the subject until they were forced to leave the room for the next talk.
Since then, I've thought a lot about what tape does that folks like so much.
I think that aside from the stuff that's easily measured (such as distortions) it's the way that the medium reacts to the dynamics of music. Maybe it's the harmonic content and/or envelope after an impulse or how those envelopes layer over one another in a chord, but it does seem to me that it's dynamic in nature. What it does depends on the changes in level, the transient characteristic, pitch and all the other items that make up the nuts and bolts of music.
I do have to wonder if there is a "chicken or the egg" component here though.
Could all those great older recordings we love that were tracked and mastered on tape make us miss those characteristics when they're not present?
Sure.
And just like a great drummer will alter his technique to suite a particular venue's acoustic , did the players who truly embraced the recording studio learn to work with the characteristics of tape to make a better sound.
I'm sure that also happened.
But, I think these things are reasons why we perceive the the things that tape imparts to the sound as "musical".
Given the proliferation of tape machine modeled processing plugins (and I believe that a Waves product was modeled on a particular ATR102 some of us may have intimate knowledge of), folks can't seem to get enough of what analog tape does to their music.
I think that there's a "magic bullet" component at work here that partially explains the current popularity of tape/console emulation and interest in bouncing through tape and only time will tell if this is a passing thing.
Lot's of speculation and "I thinks" here so please take this post in the light that it was written in. Maybe you have your own ideas and I'd love to hear them.
But, that's one of things I really love about attending these talks at the AES Conventions. They make me think!