Ok, before we pick up one, we think that’s it’s important to give things some perspective/insight.
First of all, we assume ‘best’ means- ‘the most faithful’. That’s likely what majority of people have behind such question, don’t they?
Then, we grew up on tape and reel tape machines.
This sets the perspective.
With that said. To us, with all these years spent with tapes, there’s no yet technology available as of now that is able to emulate all (with emphasis on all) analog tape sound aspects.
So, to set expectations in this regard, right from the very beginning- they’re not quite there yet.
If you’re looking for this very sound, you need to reach for tape, no exception.
We certainly did not hear all plugins either. However, based on what we could do so far, there’s still some development ahead.
At this point many ask: well, maybe there are some hardware tools that get closer then?
What comes to mind is Anamod ATS-1 (no longer available). It has some ‘coloration’ pretty close. However, it feels more like a deck’s electronics with some cool tape qualities. Anyway, that’s the only gear we’ve known so far with an attempt to emulate tape thing so completely.
There’s some other stuff, that’s not entirely related to tape, yet we found it having some similarities in this regard.
Surprisingly, Gyraf XXIII Tilt EQ (tube version, we haven’t heard the solid state one though) with its extensions is capable of giving lows certain tape character, that’s pretty convincing! Not so for upper ranges, however
(they’re nice on their own, yet not tape alike)!
A good companions are Maselec MDS/MPL high frequency limiters. They’re capable of giving HF some interesting qualities, yet they imo miss some finer control than just threshold to get there. Anyway, with some program material they can get close.
Getting back to plugins.
We think that Softube’s Tape is worth considering, It has certain compression (subtle) similarities with tape (in B/C modes). And in our opinion it is the closest so far (although still relatively far away!).
Then Universal Audio (UA) ATR-102 comes second. On some program material it helps to make lower midrange a little more graceful.
Then UA’s Studer A-800. It’s close on a head bump.
All of them above feel not true to the source in their upper ranges though, esp. the latter two (and esp. the last one). Some qualities are there, yet not quite there.
A side note. We preliminarily investigated this topic some time ago and it appeared that tape emulation would need to involve pretty sophisticated multi-band compression with a lot of bands, way more than today’s room correction software implements EQ frequency ranges. It means that it’d be pretty resource extensive. Doable, yet not super practical.
With that said, certainly there are other plugins as well. Yet they bring more of their own individual character in chase for tape sound. It might be an advantage, like some uniqueness, or disadvantage- if you’re looking for that sound.
So, are they useless then? No! Absolutely no!
If you ask us, we’re after uniqueness :). For example, quite recently, we’ve just used noise generated by one of these plugins in order to support some reconstruction process during remastering.
Sometimes HF boost on UAD’s emulations can serve better than just the same on other EQs! If program might handle what they do in lower ranges however. So they’re more suitable/useful in mixing scenarios, rather than mastering.
Some bottom-end light mixes might benefit from esp. UA’s A-800 that is capable of fattening sometimes in pretty interesting way. Yet for mastering, it’s usually too big change.
And so on.
So, they all have their place.
Anyway, something worth to mention- do not loose the bigger picture!
Sometimes good EQ decision/move may do more good to the sound/mix than tape effect.
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