From Rick Carson:
For years and years I've been staring at photos of classic and modern sessions, always trying to learn what I can about my favorite producers, mixers, and engineers. I've probably spent hundreds of hours staring at photos, studying the racks and searching for unique pieces of gear. I eventually stumbled across a quote from Michael Brauer, about about a certain someone being 100% "in the box" except for a single piece of hardware, which led me to the discovery that I am proud to present to you. The MixHead.
There are few who wax nostalgic about the early days of digital recording, but in the transitional years of the late '90s and early '00s, when digital audio processing was still young, there were several hardware devices that crunched the ones and zeros themselves, saving the CPU for the complicated workloads required just to run the DAWs of the time. Some famous examples of these "digital in/digital out" devices include expensive equalizers and limiters that remain in use by professional engineers today. And, with modern computing power being vastly superior, many have been ported to plugins as well. The processor presented here was one of these devices, and it did something that at the time was quite unique: it aimed to add warmth and increased perceived loudness to digital recordings with the characteristic sound of analog tape saturation, but without the harshness associated with digital clipping.
This was done using a dedicated 1U rack unit with internal digital processing and AES inputs and outputs. This "plugin in a box" was designed to give digital recordings the glue that engineers felt they missed, without the hassle, wow and flutter, noise, and maintenance of actual tape machines or the sonic degradation associated in that era with yet another a/d-d/a conversion pass.
With the complex modeling available today and a market flooded with so many digital recreations, emulations, and mutations, looking back on the time of the original device provides an interesting retrospective: It was created with a very specific goal in mind, and this goal was achieved with a lot of theory (and assumptions) about what tape really did. Oddly, the results of all that effort created a processor that may well be even more effective and relevant now than it was in the years it was actually in production. Make Believe Studios MixHead captures the lightning in a bottle that this unique box offered. Knowing what we do now, and with myriad tape plugins at our disposal, some of the design approaches taken with the original unit may seem backwards or counter-intuitive today, but they are approaches that still work, and are quite fun to experiment with. We even added a few requested features like tenth of a decibel HF Adjust and a new 3.75ips lo-fi mode.
In practice, you may find that the 30ips setting sounds like it has more distortion than the 15ips setting. That's fine. You may hear some interesting phase interplay at in the higher frequencies that you wouldn't normally associate with tape. That's also fine. You will also find that the input and drive controls are highly interactive, and that the HF Adjust is great for adjusting the top end in a way that sounds natural. MixHead wasn't created to do what your other tape plugins do. It resurrects and modernizes an outboard hardware DSP box previously relegated to the dreaded digital graveyard.
YouTube.com/watch?v=0VtG5S5ia-U
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