Handsomeaudio Zulu

Agreed. Mods, maybe delete all mine/prints banter where irrelevant if he’s down for that. Not even sure we were both having the same conversation. Good luck picking the bones out :wink:

Just leave it; who cares? Just keep moving forward.

This is what I would call “The Real Analog Heat” :relaxed:

Folks,
let’s get passionate about making music, making great songs and spending time with our loved ones and family.

Let’s not get passionate about fighting each other.

My passion is strictly about tape. I have no personal bias against any plugin or developer whatsoever. But the reality is I can’t get (insert plugin or hardware device aside from Zulu) to do the following:

Handle high signal levels without going into full out distortion.

Compress like tape. Not like a compressor, like tape. You cannot use a compressor to simulate tape compression. Digital or analog. Won’t happen. Tape compresses extremely fast, makes very soft knee alterations to the level of audio with an almost instantaneous attack and release. As a former beta tester of plugin compressors and tape emulators, fast compression is extremely difficult to do in digital without artifacts. This is not a criticism, its an observation held by myself and many other professionals. Its where digital and analog start to separate.

See its not about digital is bad because its digital. Its about I want my sounds. If a platform is incapable of delivering a proper response to audio stimulus then that doesn’t make that platform bad, it makes it incapable of delivering the proper or accurate response to audio in the context of my desires. So either you keep looking or you give up.

My problem is that my entire understanding of audio revolves around analog tape. The way I learned to set gain, tweak a compressor was done in the context of using an analog console with a 2" machine whirring away. Alot of what I do, just flat out doesn’t play nice with a fully digital workflow. These days I’m more hybrid than anything but even in that context I always felt like simply having analog compression wasn’t the key. What was missing was tape. Not just something that kind of sounded like tape but it actually behaved like it. Mixing a record with a really hot kick drum to tape is not similar to doing the same record but with an SSL compressor instead of tape.

The truth is, tape is extremely complex, Just the magnetic tape itself. It has its own set of variables to study and identify. Then you add in the machine electronics and you made something that was already complicated, that much more complicated.

Zulu uses 8 circuits to create the tape effect and the machine electronics effect. A tape machine has the input stage (with transformers typically), the active amplifier stage (we won’t even talk the capacitor types), the coupling stage to the head, the record head, the playback head, the coupling stage to the playback head, the active repro amplifier stage, the output stage with transformers. This is aside from the calibration circuitry, the myriad of circuits that existed in the tape machine. If you really pay attention to how tape machines work, it will click in your head how a tape deck not only saturates, but compresses, modulates, tilt shifts the audio, all while maintaining the perception of the signal just getting fatter and more controlled. Imagine trying to model that in digital? I want to believe that somebody has actually done that, I’m a functioning record producer living in 2016. But my ears tell me different. The minute you get past the tone of these emulations and start digging into their dynamic character, the results differ extremely from a real machine. A proper tape emulation (minus the hiss, wow and flutter - but I’m working on the W&F for my tape delay) has to replicate the behavior of a machine under moderate and extreme levels as well as super light and conservative levels.

It has huge benefits for genres like EDM. To obtain those super loud masters, a great deal of cuts in frequency and shifting around of values is done to achieve the loudest master, even then heavy digital limiting, clipping, parallel clipping, comes at the cost of digital distortion on the audio, where the bass gets distorted or the top end gets crunchy.
If you have a tape machine or Zulu for the purpose of doing your squashing (which isn’t squashing at all) then alot of those cuts and chewing away of frequencies is unnecessary. Something I think would benefit any genre that really relies on low end and subsonic frequencies. I definitely think bass has suffered in the absence of tape.

As a medium it handles extremely hot signal levels with less drama than a digital system will, integrating it into a modern mastering chain has many benefits especially for loudness friendly genres like dubstep, EDM, electronica, intelligent genres etc…

I would really love to process somebody else’s material rather than my own, but in the meantime, I’m going to add those clips isolated and peaking at -.03db. That includes the dry file. Again these are examples that are meant to illustrate the fun you can have when you overdrive a LoFi calibration of Zulu but they are very analog and very telling. The dry loop versus the Zulu clips showcases that.

Thanks
-L.

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Amen, listen to the man ! :thup:

I really love it when you enter into technical details, @illacov.
I am so ignorant on the subject… Thank you for the details.

What about entry level ?
I’ve seen “Zulu can connect to a line level device and can also connect to an active microphone preamplifier”
So I would think that I cannot just plug my bass direclty in the Zulu, am I right ?
There is no jumper to enable guitar level entry, isn’t there ?

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If you plug a passive bass into Zulu (and I’ve done this with an electric guitar as well) it will pass signal however, the overall impact of Zulu will be minimized by the low output signal of your bass. If you have an active bass, you’ll fare a little better since they have a hotter output. But the best way to run Zulu is to have your signal coming off of something that’s already line level or close to it. A guitar pedal into Zulu will work. A boost pedal, a stand alone mic preamp or the pres on your board. For a live setting, I’d like to think that if you ran your bass into a DI to a preamp (this could easily be one of those cheap little mixers from Guitar Center (insert chain store here) that go for $30 (excellent as a poor mans IEM system) and then fed that signal to Zulu you’d be fine. By the same gesture, it really depends on your bass itself. Zulu used to exist as a cable at one point and I had great success using it on guitar solos into a Fender Deluxe. Normally this was off a Gibson with Humbuckers so they have a hotter output. For what you’re trying to do, you’ll need to set Zulu to the LOFI Deck setting, LOFI Headroom and more likely than not probably TK mode. This way your sensitivity to signal is set extremely low which will make it more friendly to low level signals.

I plan on making a small Zulu cube that will have just have TS in and XLR out. This will be for the live players out there who only play mono instruments and need something small. I’m thinking just 1 knob to control everything. I’ll have to find the perfect rotary switch to do it (gotta be durable for the road) and then just design the little case. I’d love to make it small enough to fit in your pocket :grin:

BTW I’m not very good at it but I play bass. I own a modified Fender/Squier 5 String with Lindy Fralin Passive Pickups. Smokin good. I’ve recorded about 100 records with it and I’m loving it. However, my all time favorite bass is a Fender P bass with passive Bartonlinis. Dear God, the funkety funk that baby makes. How can you not shake your butt and listen to a sick bass line?

BTW if you have the stereo Zulu and want to use your guitar/bass with it, I recommend a TS to XLR male, that will suffice to get you into the system.
Thanks
-L.

3 Likes

Hey L,

Do I just email you my stems to process? I’ll send you some sp-1200, yocto 808, s1000, mpc60, Ensoniq EPS classic, etc drum loops by weekend.

Regards,
L

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langston(at)handsomeaudio(dot)com

Please feel free.

I also have Google Drive attached to that email. So if you use Drive you can share it with me that way as well.

Thanks

As of this post we have 182 click throughs on the Handsome Audio link - if we assume a sales pipeline of 3x then that’s around 60 QSO’s (qualified sales opportunities) - I hope with all my heart that it translates to some real dollar for these guys, and just goes to show that a bit of forum “debate” can be good for business :grin: - so mods, go easy on that edit button :wink:

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Anything that’s not worth even the slightest bit of debate isn’t worth much. Let’s just do it with mutual respect and let’s pony up some frame of reference if we are going to make claims.

I just spent the last hour slamming the input sections of some very well known tape plugins and let’s just say they didn’t fare well. Not cuz I feel a certain way about the people behind them, but because I see an input knob and my instinct is to turn that puppy up for mo’ joy! Unfortunately they all just distort, literally JUST distort. Especially if you bypass their autogain controls which don’t sound like autogain at all.

I then spent the previous hour beating up the regular saturation plugins I own from numerous companies. RMS matched them to the Zulu clips I posted and they couldn’t hang at all. Seriously, I am all for a good old fashioned debate or comparison thread but let’s actually show some results. I am uploading the Zulu clips plus the drum loop I made. Even on crappy headphones you can tell how the transients vs the energy distribution, the super fast tape compression and the overall realness of the audio is prevalent in Zulu.

I sat with tape decks for 2 years and made this thing match the decks we had here. Let me explain something, Zulu FAILED 100s of times in the very beginning. It was either too distorted or the distortion was wrong. The compression was off, the frequency interactivity was bad, the SNR was off, the controls were too quirky, the top end was wrong on the HiFi deck which was based on the Studer A810 we have here (extremely hard to get right but 2 years later LOL), the body was wrong on the ProFi deck (based on the Teac and Tascam machines we have here), the LoFi was too dirty (compared to the Tascam Portastudio we have).

The thing y’all have to understand is where Zulu’s purpose lies if you haven’t guessed now is in the recording process. Not just the mix process. Mixing is a really safe place for equipment to integrate, the majority of heavy lifting is done. Everything after that save for extreme circumstances (in a digital setting) is minor compared to how something was recorded. Recording equipment sees far more abuse, far more extreme situations than a mixing application will ever provide it. Once you track your killer vocal after you used your U87 and your Neve 1073 to an 1176 and attenuate the output with a pad because you love how the output section of the 1176 distorts when you overdrive it, then a plugin which will never have to see the kinds of levels the tracking chain did is on easy street. But if you took said plugin and added it to the tracking chain, everything changes. Now you’re going to be concerned with headroom, now you’re going to be faced with that device offering broad change rather than minute change (mixing mentality). And in reality since a good deal of digital emus and unfortunately analog emus aren’t really focused on the tracking side of audio, those changes (mainly because of their limitations with loud signal) are perceived as minor. And in application they end up being closer to a plugin than they were intended to be. Why? Because you can’t hit them very hard without incurring some major distortion. Obviously this is true for the plugins as well or you get results that don’t really make or break the recording.

If you can nail this behavior down, then you also inherently have a device that’s perfect for mixing. Its got a robust input section, robust operating level and can see heavy use from soup to nuts on a production.

All I’m truly saying is if you want to see just how good a plugin tape sim (or hardware for that matter) is, then send some drums through it and do the simplest thing a tape machine was designed for, send it HEALTHY amounts of level. Avoid all that talk of tickling meters or watch what the light says, use your ears. Whats the amount of change you perceive from nominal gain versus moderate to heavy gain? Are the changes that big? How about the transient response? I’ve seen users attribute things that aren’t happening on their emus to the results. Loss of highs is not transient softening, increased volume is not saturation.

I’ve had people send me clips of their hardware emus doing the moderate to heavy gain thing. Be glad to post them without any labels.
Anybody care to run my drum loop through their software emus?

Thanks
-L.

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And in the end… what will it cost?:slight_smile:

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To sum up it would be great to test this new tape emulator against established and proven tape emulation plugins

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Have to say this – I’m really admiring the way you engage people as a representative of a company. Many companies like to be all ‘by musicians, for musicians’ but this is walking the walk. All the best with the Zulu, seems like a killer product!

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$400 on promotion. After we sell all 250 units at that price, the full price is $750.

Thanks
-L

Got some tape plugins?

Care to do a medium and high gain test?
Use the 303 loop (link coming soon).

Thanks
-L.

Sum up what? He literally offered to send you the samples he processed with the Zulu to send through your established and proven tape emulation plug-ins for comparison.

Dude you were sold at ‘transistors’ and a couple of 5 second clips, you already ordered one. Why don’t you just let other people ask whatever questions they require to for them to become as convinced as you are. Jeez…

That wasn’t a question that was posed lol. He glossed over everything that was written, and reiterated what illacov already said.

The best way to test this box is hands on.
Where can I order and what delivery time to expect?
Shipping to EU?

Would you be willing to process some of illacov’s samples through your plugins?