AES Vienna Video: Modeling The Sound Of Analog Tape With AnaMod ATS-1

Dave Amels from AnaMod shows off what he's been up to lately at the 122nd AES conference in Vienna. Previously, Dave's most well-known work may have been the DSP programming inside the Bomb Factory compressor line of software plug-ins. This time around, he has moved from Digital Signal Processing to Analog Signal Processing (ASP?) with the AnaMod box.
AnaMod is the result of Dave, a software developer, taking his ideas and mathematical models for signal processing and implementing them in hardware analog circuitry -- as opposed to code in a plugin or application.
The AnaMod's application is simulation of the coloration and imaging of audio that is commonly expected from analog tape. It's a dual-mono box you can track or mix through that adds a desirable sheen of artifacts into signal entirely without digital processing of any kind. We haven't seen a design like this before. We've seen plenty of modeling in the opposite direction - analog devices being modeled in digital signal processing code resulting in AU and VST plugins - but not any pure analog results such as this. Truly unique. Check out the Gearwire video for more info on this "full-circle" example of signal processing.

(Unfortunately, the banana pictured in the video is not included with the AnaMod.)

Category:

Music

Tags:

• music
• AnaMod Analog Tape Simulator

[bbuteo]

Most emulations of the `tape sound´ focus on the saturation characteristic alone and underestimate the effect of a subtle amount of `flutter´ - high frequency fluctuations of the tape speed. This adds something which is

 probably the most important part of the special sound: The harmonic lines are "widened" by the effect of frequency modulation due to flutter which causes a 'thickening' of the audio signal contributing to the fat sound of analog,