I bought a TEAC A-3340S off a guy who described it as “serviced, works great, just needs a clean.” It arrived with a seized capstan, a belt that had turned into a sticky black rope, and three blown fuses in a baggie taped to the chassis. That’s the hobby in a sentence. You don’t buy […]
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I finally did the thing I’d been putting off. I printed a mix to the Otari MX-5050 at 15 IPS, dumped it back in, and then spent an afternoon trying to make the plugin versions sit in the same place. Same source multitrack, same levels out of the DAW, same converters on the way back. […]
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The bench light was on and the console was open again, a Neve-style input module flipped on its side with the output transformer still warm from the last session. I had a mix running through it in parallel, just to hear what the iron did to a drum bus I’d already compressed and EQ’d to […]
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Another week, another tape emulation. My inbox gets a few of these a month now, and most of them are a picture of a reel-to-reel with a wow knob bolted onto an input transformer. So when a spec sheet lands, I read it line by line before I even install the demo. The claims are […]
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I keep a pair of bus compressors patched at the bench: a real SSL-style VCA unit and whatever plugin emulation I happen to be testing that week. Last month I spent an afternoon A/B-ing plugin emulations against each other and against the hardware, and the results were messier than the marketing suggests. Here is what […]
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I run the same dumb test on a loose schedule. Sine sweep into a saturator, output into a scope and a spectrum analyzer, then I sit there counting harmonics like an idiot. It is the fastest way I know to find out whether a plugin is actually modeling a transformer or just slapping a tanh […]
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I get asked for monitor recommendations more than any other gear question. Strip away the marketing and it’s always the same: the room matters more than the box, and no $800 pair will fix a corner-loaded 3×3 meter bedroom. But within that caveat, some pairs tell the truth better than others. These are the ones […]
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The car test is not a myth and it is not a mastering problem. I have lost count of how many times I have bounced a mix that sat perfectly on my nearfields, played it in the wagon on the way home, and heard the low end turn into a single undistinguishable thump. Same file. […]
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The first time I scoped a 1kHz sine through a Neve input transformer and watched the second harmonic rise as I cranked the input, something clicked. It wasn’t magic. It was a curve. A very specific, asymmetrical, level-dependent curve that plugins have been chasing for twenty years. And most of them still get the top […]
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I get asked this on a fairly regular rotation: “I just bought a crusty old console. Should I recap it?” My answer is always the same. Depends on whether the caps are actually the problem. Nine times out of ten a guy buys a 40-year-old desk, sees dusty electrolytics under the hood, and immediately orders […]
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