Here's a fun test - analog vs digital

[fryingpan]

I voted both ALL the tracks are tape and NONE of them are, because frankly I thought I could hear some trickery. I thought the obvious hiss on Track 2 was an emulation. It turns out it isn't, and it's actually tape. But I'd say it's shitty tape (or a shitty/unmaintained tape machine), because the hiss is far too high and the dynamics are a bit lacking, it sounds exaggerated (think modern psych-pop such as Tame Impala or Unknown Mortal Orchestra etc.). Apart from that, I can't say which track I like best because I think the mix is lacking.

[Keppy]

I definitely thought track 2 was the odd one out, but I perceived it as the LEAST distorted and thus thought all the others had been recorded to tape a bit too hot.

It sort of makes sense knowing that tracks 1/4 had some processing to mimic tape. The real tape performed better IMO.

But why in the world did track 3 sound more like 1/4? (to me, at least) That's the only one that doesn't make sense to me.

[Radical CJ]

I picked Track 2 as tape almost immediately on the basis that it sounded the most compressed and had some (perceived at least) loss of high/low frequencies. However ... I am dumbfounded that I was able to pick correctly (and secretly thought you might be tricking with no correct options), so I wouldn't be confident that I could replicate that result consistently if the experiment was repeated 10 times.

[pacealot]

I also picked track 2 "correctly," but only because I kept going back and forth as to whether all that tape hiss was just a trick. In the end, I just assumed it wasn't. But fryingpan is right — that deck needs some serious work! And my one issue with this test is that, now that the results are out, it's clear that that one tape deck is a stand-in for "all of tape," and it isn't a fair test if the machine is poorly aligned. Tape can and does very frequently sound much, much better than that. But that now goes beyond the remit of this specific test.

I also, wrongly, picked track 3, because I noticed it had no perceptible tape hiss and felt very flat and neutral, and so it felt like that was the trick — that it was possibly a very well-aligned machine with SR or some other similarly effective noise reduction, and not pushed or saturated too much to avoid imparting any obvious "tapey" artefacts. There have been plently of "sterile" recordings made to tape as well as to digital.

What it proved to me was that: a.) people's biases are always stronger than their perceptional abilities, no matter how great those abilities may be; b.) in 2021 you can use any medium you want and sound equivalently good or bad depending on your desires, your skill levels, and the capabilities of the gear at hand (i.e. a cassette deck is never going to sound like a well maintained Ampex ATR-102, but the ATR might sound as poor as the cassette deck or worse if it's not aligned right, or the heads are too badly worn, etc.); and c.) you should make the decision to work with analog or digital (or a combination of both) based on your preferred working methodology (I personally prefer the tactile experience of working with tape, physically doing the edits — even the smell of it), rather than on the idea that one sounds inherently "better" than the other....

[aron]

Yeah. I got the tracks from one of the most famous youtube mixer guys out there. One would think his tape deck would be calibrated.

[fryingpan]

The funny thing may be that he intentionally has that tape deck in that state because that's what people chasing the analog sound want nowadays.

[aron]

Very possible!