“What kind of treatment does it to the signal. I understand it is not a simple 6dB boost ... Does it involve some more or less complex tape compression modelisation or is it more simple than that.
I only used it once so far on a rough mix, it sounded rather nice and usable, not as drastic as a cranesong would do, but a bit fuller (in a good way)...
Please, can you tell us a bit more without unveiling a secret receipe
malice”
Let’s begin with WHY I did that digital saturation:
So many audio people are in a “mad race” to make things louder. I am not talking about turning the volume knob to louder. The race is about being louder relative to another song, or commercial… The louder one gets more noticed, so they say.
Well, so many mastering guys, including some of the very well known, keep pushing the level up, and of course at some point the signal clips. I wish people did not clip but many do. Some music tolerates it better, some worse.
So here is what the digital soft saturation does:
It boosts the signal by 6dB, thus it is a lot louder. Of course if that is all it did, then anything over -6dBFS (the top 6dB) would be clipped.
So in order to avoid clipping we modify the process as follows:
All signals up to -12dBFS are boosted by 6dB. The range between -12dBFS and 0dBFS (full scale) gets some “special treatment”. It gets “squeezed into what is left, which is the top 6dB.
The secret is how to do it (the squeezing) well. Clearly it is not a straight line approach. I looked at tapes and the higher the signal gets, the more magnetized the tape gets so the impact of the peaks is less as the signal grows. That is the story in a nutshell.
BR
Dan Lavry