Info about Audio Equipment
The Aardvark Aard Scape Tape Emulator: Gain Quality Sound Through Analogue Tape Recording
With technology taking its toll in today's world, it is becoming more and more useful for many, whether in home studios or in semi-professional surroundings. With digital being loved by many and the better dynamic range, faster access time, and a better performance it has, a lot of people still believe the harmonic distortion is of an unexciting and flat quality. This brought in a new product called the Aardvark Aard Scape Tape Emulater to help bring back some analogue warmth characteristic to most signals.
Aard Scape is a unit that is free standing with a processor that is single channeled. It is said to achieve unique quality in sound for analogue tape recording and in the same manner preserving digital recording.
Being small in size (18cm wide, 4cm high, and 24cm deep), it is enclosed with steel surroundings and has rubber feet. On the panel in the rear there are 5 connectors, slide switch, audio inputs that have an unbalanced jack socket (quarter inch), and a 3-pin balanced XLR. The outputs have both balanced XLR and unbalanced jack. Then finally, a co-axial AC power socket (low voltage).
The panel in the front has 3 rotary controls for adjusting output level, input level, and how much tape saturation effect to use. There are 2 slide switches, 2 push buttons (labeled yellow with a black background), and a LED bargraph meter that covers 24dB of range. Then there's the yellow LED power switch and Bypass button with red LED.
Audible effects all depend upon the input signal. Its best effects happen when the input signal peaks to the 9th step of the bargraph meter. Adjusting the Warmth control gives you more saturation effect but its main use is for fine tuning. There are 2 slide switches used for fine tuning, the first being Saturation. With this you can change it to 3 settings - Hard, Medium, and Soft - for recording different tape characteristics. The second slide switch is Brilliance. It also has 3 positions to slide it to which are, Brite, Full, and Clean which will give sharpness or more edge to your sound quality.
The Aardscape worked to my satisfaction, even with unbalanced connectors. One downside I found with the output and input control settings was the difficulty of judging the saturation process because of incorrect settings through the output control that upset level matching between bypassed and processed signal paths. Using the Aardscape while tracking would give results that were unpredictable in the mix down stage. This unit does everything that it claimed it could do but it just comes down to if you like the results it brings or not.
While I was very appreciative of the saturation effect of the tape that recorded hot signals on multitrack tape, I believe it would produce better results when signals are processed through mixdown stage. Maybe if one has more experience using the unit you would find appropriate settings for track-laying stage but be cautious that too much use on a lot of tracks will create a fatiguing sound and may give impressions of a track being badly recorded.
The unit has some harmonic distortion in its signal path even at low input levels it becomes pretty evident and when you have it at high input levels it is stronger and a lot more evident. The Aardscape does well with percussion and drums but I wasn't to pleased with most harmonically instruments or vocals. It's worth testing the unit yourself to come to see if it fits your taste.
It is a strong recommendation from me to test the Aardscape out thoroughly because of problems I have found with the balanced connections. It threw off an increase in electronic noise, making it very unusable, plus this was my 2nd sample of Aardscape and both had similar problems. It may have just been a problem with shipping or quality testing in the factory.
You'll find many to swear by the Aardscape and others will not be so keen to it. The whole reason for using a Aardscape is for adding distortion through overdriving analogue tape on certain sounds or instruments. What it comes down to in the end is how useful and appropriate the Aardscape will be to one and is a decision one will have to make.