Universal Audio Studer A800
Universal Audio divorced the sound of tape from the mechanics of tape - and somehow made the reels spin.
Overview
Somewhere in the design brief for the Studer A800 plug-in, someone at Universal Audio decided a tape emulation should also be fun to look at. The tape reels on the interface actually spin. A manufacturer document called this "a real client pleaser," and also pointed out that you can click the IPS knob to stop them if the motion makes you dizzy.
The Studer A800 is a UAD-2 plug-in, priced at $349 and available in AU, RTAS, and VST formats. All of them require UAD-2 hardware to run. It models a single tape machine, the Studer A800 multichannel recorder, and the modeling is thorough. According to EQ Magazine (March 2011, p.15), the plug-in is endorsed by Studer and models the entire tape path and hardware electronics. Universal Audio's own framing, as reported in Electronic Musician, is that the company divorced the sound of tape from the mechanics of tape. The reviewer's summary was that they didn't have to clean the plug-in's heads once.
People didn't love analog tape recorders because of tape stretch, alignment headaches, head wear, window splices, demagnetizing, rewind times, high-frequency self-erasure, head bump, wow, flutter, oxide sheds, or capstan motor replacements. They loved them because tape is a signal processor. Feed a sine wave hotter than -20dB into tape and you hear distortion that only increases as you push it harder. The A800 chases that behavior rather than the maintenance schedule.
The controls are built around calibration. There's a selection of four tape formulations, including 3M 250 and Ampex 456. The front panel lets you choose IPS (7.5, 15, and 30), a tape calibration standard from four choices spanning +3dB to +9dB, and input/output controls to trim the distortion. A button calibrates these to Studer's original specs as you change tape speed, formulation, or EQ. As Electronic Musician observed, half the fun is tweaking the trims yourself.
The signal path modeling goes deeper than tape formulation. The A800 includes adjustments for both the repro and sync head high/low EQ, bias, high-frequency EQ (pre-emphasis), and a choice of NAB or CCIR response curve for 7.5 and 15ips. 30ips uses the standard AES curve. You can add hum and/or hiss if you want them. You can also switch the "input" among bypass, input electronics, sync head, and repro (playback) head. That lets you monitor directly through the virtual tape machine's electronics or from either head, each with its own bias and EQ settings.
The most unusual feature is Gang Controls. When enabled on any instance of the A800 in a session, the Gang button completely links the controls across all instances of the plug-in in that session. Electronic Musician called this "brilliant" and noted it's extremely handy for setting up the A800 to work like HEAT, where global changes affect all tracks. Then you switch Gang off to fine-tune saturation type and amount per channel. The reviewer flagged one caveat: the parameters become unlinked when you scroll through presets. Universal Audio said this would be addressed in a future release.
Running an A800 on every channel costs real DSP. Electronic Musician reported that 18 tracks of A800 processing used 60 percent of a UAD Quad card running at 96kHz. The GUI also takes up a lot of screen space, which the same review listed among the plug-in's limitations. And the UAD-2 hardware requirement is absolute: no card, no A800.
The reviewers kept coming back to whether it sounds like tape, and what kind of tape it sounds like - how the deck was calibrated, what the tape speed was, whether the bias was tweaked for minimum distortion or minimum noise. The A800 exposes all of those variables rather than hard-coding a single flavor. Electronic Musician placed it in the category of simulations that subtly alter the sonic character of a mixing environment rather than crossing the line into outright distortion, alongside HEAT and Phoenix. It ranked the A800 a close second to HEAT for ease of use on an overall mix, while noting it was the more flexible of the two.
The hardware it emulates was still earning its keep long after the plug-in arrived.
Collectors and engineers who work with the plug-in tend to treat it as a calibration tool as much as a saturation box. The four tape types, the speed choices, the +3dB to +9dB calibration range, and the head selection all invite you to build a specific deck rather than accept a preset. The Gang feature makes it practical to apply one deck across a whole session and then break the link where individual channels need different treatment. It is not a light-touch effect by default. The input and output trims are there so you can decide how hard to hit the virtual tape.
The A800 also turns up as an optional extension inside Universal Audio's LUNA Recording System, sold separately and presumably based on the existing UAD plug-in.
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