Great price. You can use your personal discount on top of this price.
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/taupe

 

Demoing this right now. Up there with Softube tape only a bigger selection of tapes.
Never demoed it because i thought its a cpu hog, but to my surprise this one is on the lighter side of AA plugs. The GUI is responsive, not sluggish like some AA plugins.
Nice warm low end with lots of depth and nice crispy saturation, surprised by the quality of this, not a gimmick. Some tapes are very smooth, removes the digital edginess, others have attitude.
It brings the source closer to you, like real tape.
The EQ is very colored but sounds good.

 

Last edited: Feb 22, 2022

I've tested it once and didn't find the EQ or compressor very useful, but that's maybe a matter of usage.
When it comes to TaupeTape the aliasing behavior was a bit strange. Some models didn't produce any even if close to +5 on the input meter, some produced heavy aliasing at +1.
Furthermore a high signal level with TaupeTape input set to negative produced less aliasing than a low signal with TaupeTape input turned up. Usually, it's the other way around.

 

Can you demonstrate how your findings are of use?

 

I demoed this when it came out and found it to be awful and boring. Doesn't sound anything like tape. It sounds like a static eq curve of tape. 90% of what makes tape amazing is how it smears and compresses and saturates and wobbles and moves the audio around with natural artifacts and imperfections that make everything put through it sound organic and real. This does none of that.

 

On contrary, i i have all tape plugins, algo, nebula, etc. Taupe acts very dynamic based on the input where you can hear how the curve changes, the mids fall into the right place, a very pleasing natural low end bump, the saturation is so nice and that highs are contained.
Studers ( C tapes) are beautiful.
You can really drive these hard and get the most pleasing effect ever.
EQ ( C ) is beautiful, compression is good as expected.
CDSoundmaster Studer R2R tapes sound nice but may be too sweet for the mixbus while with Taupe you can put it on a mixbus.
Nebula J37 is also great on individual sources but can be too heavy for some sources, it adds a lot of weight and takes out a lot of high end, great for clicky digital percussion/type of sounds.
One more important thing i like about Taupe is transients are not smeared with this fake cheap plastic tape like effect like some plugins.

 

For wow and flutter you have plenty of other plugins to add that effect :D

 

Can you elaborate what you disagree with, based on your experience and measurements?

I couldn't find this in any of my measurements.

 

Load plugin doctor. Load C1 ( studer) and switch to harmonic analysis, now drive the input to max. You can switch the mix knob to max( tape) to see it even more. You will see how driving the input adds tasty saturation. It makes the source sit nicer.
The mix knob also changes the responsiveness, tone and transients.
The econo knob can sometimes make it sound even nicer, it seems to affect the transients.

 

What does my experience and measurements have to do... Where do you want to go with that?

It's 2022, you can do a lot with anything. It's common knowledge

The technical measurement aspect of plugins has no benefit to any discussions related to sound unless its for troubleshooting purposes.

 

Err, sure, this goes for every saturation plugin, but you were referring to the freq response and this doesn't happen at all.

Or did I misunderstand this?

I just wondered on what basis you disagreed with my post.

 

Practicality

 

well, I agree. aa is fucking garbage and a waste of hard drive space... whoever promotes aa needs to go to AA because they are drunk tards who clearly have no ears

 

so like what softube's saturation knob does, how cool

 

So like yeah dude, like any saturation knob, sure, only there are big differences in how that saturation sounds.
Kind of like pancakes. Two chefs, same ingredients but one will taste better.