We aren’t exactly flooded with tape emulations on the market, and the competition is very tough. VirSyn has a line of some impressive products, including the synth POSEIDON (review here), and the reverb REFLECT (review here). Let’s see if they can match their own high quality with VTAPE – The Analog Tape Suite.

VTAPE Saturator

For this plug-in bundle, I find it most important to talk about the Saturator. The reason for this is that the saturation effect of this is included in the other two plug-ins as well.

The first thing I find out is that it’s tempting to directly tweak the VTAPE Saturator to extremes. It can easily be set to sounding rather lo-fi without just sounding like a distortion unit that I sometimes think plagues tape emulators. The hiss knob is very cool, and very apparent if you want it to be. I find it to be a good addition, as I sometimes like to have noise very present. Often the presets sound more noisy than I think actual studio tape would, but controlling, or even turning off the hiss, is no problem at all so I really don’t mind.

Besides the hiss knob, VTAPE Saturator has a flutter knob as well as a bias knob. The bias control changes the sound of the distortion. With the risk of using terms that mean different things to everyone, I’ll say that the more you turn it, the harsher it sounds. The flutter knob is really important for general “lo-finess”. Together with the other controls, it can really make the signal sound like an old Hong Kong movie. This quality – or emulation of lack of quality if you will – is something that I find somewhat unique to this set of plug-ins. McDSP AC2, Massey Tape-Head and DUY DaD Tape focuses on entirely different things in my opinion. Digidesigns Reel Tape Suite is the only one that I can think of which could achieve similar results. That’s not the only thing these two bundles have in common, as we will see.

In some tape emulators, such as McDSP AC2, there’s a graphical curve present, showing exactly what happens to the signal. VirSyn have taken this one step further and actually added a separate EQ. Though not graphical, and besides only having few controls, it makes it a bit more flexible than it’s competitors. The EQ consists of two shelving filters and one mid filter peak band. Compression is achieved by controlling the input and output. With this in mind, you probably could do sort of the same things as you can with other tape emulators. This sounds really good right? There are a few things, however, that keeps me from saying this is the ultimate tape emulator.

VTAPE Saturator is rather CPU hungry, which I find a little annoying in a tape plug-in. Depending on your mix technique you might want to load saturators on a lot of channels, and if you’re using VTAPE you’ll quickly notice it taking a bite off of your CPU.

VTAPE Saturator causes 33 samples of delay. As you know HD can deal with these things, but on LE it’s simply not fun. This is unfortunately a big deal for LE users, and I found it a bit odd as well, so I contacted Harry Gohs at VirSyn and asked him about it. Strangely, his reply made a lot of sense.

The reason for the small delay is only the wow&flutter unit simulating the small speed changes. This one needs the delay. The other aspects like saturation have no inherent delay. But i think that the modulation noise arising from a small amount of wow&flutter are essential for the final “glue” effect.

Is this what made me think the lo-fi settings on VTAPE Saturator sounds so good? Probably. What of the “glue” effect that Mr Gohs mentions then? I think he’s correct. This is probably one of the reasons that I like it on busses, especially the master. It’s more practical that way as well, smashing out 20 instances of VTAPE Saturator will leave your computer grasping for power.

VTAPE Delay

The second plug-in in the bundle is VTAPE Delay. The first thing that strikes me with it – especially after running through the presets – is that this could be gold for strange FX like things. Sure, you can dial in a typical quarter note delay, but you can also make all hell break loose. What is it that makes this happen then? Actually it’s because it’s a tap delay, but in a special way. The main characteristic of VTAPE Delay is that you can tap in the delay using a step sequencer. Just click in the pattern and off you go. The sequencer is divided into squares, each representing one 16th note.

Besides this, and the same EQ, input and output controls, as well as the tape section from the Saturator, the VTAPE Delay has a separate delay section. What’s important to mention here are tempo, delay, and damping knobs. Next to these is a ’sync’ button in case you just want it to sync with the host. Also next to these is the much appreciated ‘kill’ button. It simply kills the delay feedback. It’s very handy if you’re trying out various of things, or if you’ve programmed a delay that increases with each repetition. Dealing with that, by the way, is done with the ‘feedback’ knob. Next to that is a ‘rotation’ knob which helps you set the stereo effect of the delay.

VTAPE Delay is the only of the three plug-ins that don’t cause any delay. How strange doesn’t that sound? It has a bug when used in mono mode, which won’t let any signal pass if the rotation knob is set to zero. VirSyn are aware of this and it’s on their fix list.

VTAPE Flanger

With version 1.1 of the VTAPE package, VirSyn included a new plug-in, a flanger. To me, this made this package a director competitor to Digidesigns Reel Tape Suite. Now if only every other company out there could follow VirSyns lead and release an extra plug-in with every .x upgrade, I would be very happy.

I like flangers. I hate that there isn’t a bigger selection of them in the Pro Tools world. With this said, I of course find it great that it was a flanger VirSyn decided to stuff in with the other VTAPE plug-ins. But is it worth having? Like pretty much all flangers on the market, it suffers from latency. Pro Tools indicates around 500 in my test session, and that is, as you probably know, very noticeable. This again is necessary according to VirSyn, otherwise “through zero” flanging would be impossible.

Something that you should know about this flanger is that it’s definitely a manual-driven thing. I don’t mean that you need a manual, but but you will control the flanging effect manually with the ’speed diff’ knob. As you control it you will see the little ball in the UI roll back and forth.

The VTAPE Flanger featurs the same saturation and in/out controls as the other two plug-ins.

Conclusion

I first intended to review this bundle months back, before the flanger was released. I’m kind of glad I didn’t, because at first I wasn’t impressed at all. The delay was unique and cool from day one, but the Saturator didn’t really do it for me. It grew on me however. The more I played with the bias and the flutter controls, the more I liked it. It’s not “instant punch” like DUY DaD Tape, “gritty distortion” like Massey Tape-Head, or “pure sweet compression” as McDSP Analog Channel AC2. If anything it’s “forgiving for your sounds” like Digidesign Reel Tape Saturator, but I still find it to have a separate character from that as well. In the end, to me, it’s most fitting for lo-fi tape sounds – the first sounds I made were scary similar to my old tape decks! I also like it on the master, and I’m sure it’s going to give DUY and McDSP a match there in my sessions. The later added flanger is nice, but nothing to write your mother about. It’s as manual as it gets, and if that suites you then you’ll like it. Either way it was very nice of VirSyn to add it in an upgrade at no additional cost. All in all this is a good bundle that continues to grow on me, but the CPU usage and latency are two big drawbacks… Or one, depending on your system.