Satin: Luscious tape machine
Nothing else quite sounds like tape. Satin puts the legacy of tape recording in your hands: from top-of-the-line multi-track consoles to humble cassette decks. All the good (saturation, transient smoothing, compression) as well as the bad (noise modulation, flutter, hiss) qualities are under your control. Construct your (im)perfect tape machine.
•Lush analogue tape sound
•Includes historical developments in tape technology
•Control up to 8 instances of Satin at once using the Group panel
•5 popular noise reduction encoder / decoder models
•Service panel: Controls for hiss, wow and flutter, bias, head gap, azimuth, saturation, high frequency compression and more
•Modern or vintage tape material
•Internal sample rate up to 384kHz
•5 circuit models for recording and reproduction EQs
•Stereo delay mode (2 or 4 heads) with multiple-mono, cross or ping-pong routing
•Tape flange mode with classic through-zero flanging
•Adjustable tape speed from 1.87 to 30ips
•Pre-emphasis and soft clipping options
•Preset browser with search functions
•NKS FX compatible
•Resizable UI from 70% to 200%
•Skinnable UI
•120+ factory presets
Features
The sound
That tape sound depends on interaction between the various parts of a tape machine. Each contributes in one way or another—enhancing, reducing, combining—to generate the final sound.
Satin models individual components and lets them interact in the same way. For maximum flexibility in sound shaping, Satin is a toolkit of alternative parts, not an emulation of a single machine. Build your own custom tape unit. The perfect final sheen for your mixdown, or “glue” multiple drum tracks together, decode old NR-encoded cassette tape, or misuse Satin for extreme effects.
Delay and flange
After developing the components for a tape machine toolkit, our minds turned other popular tape-based machines. Delay and flange immediately jumped to mind.
In service
Imagine opening up a tape machine, peeking “under the hood” and tinkering with the parts. That is what service technicians used to do, and it is what the Service Panel in Satin is for. It gives you detailed control over some of the more esoteric and characterful elements.
In the Tape section are perhaps the more readily identifiable attributes of tape recording: hiss, asperity, wow & flutter, crosstalk and bias. Dial in a little of each for a retro vibe or “glue”. Dial in the extreme settings and you can end up with the sound of poor quality tape left in someone’s basement far too long.
Decoding
Selectable Compander and Circuit settings make Satin useful as a format converter.
If you have a tape recording with an unsuitable EQ, using Circuit’s independent RecEQ and ReproEQ selectors you can set a new target EQ curve and make changes. Similarly, Compander can handle audio recorded with specific noise reduction (NR) encodings. Just run it through Satin with Decoder set to match the known NR encoding type.