TRENDY real TAPE saturation & DOLBY High End?

[rayc]

There's been a lot of palaver on line about using saturation to add some "warmth" & "crunch"from real tape for yonks and recently the BUZZ has been using a modded Dolby circuit to add some"excitement".
Since I have some old bits of gear rolling around I decided to give them both a whirl.
I was going to hook up my late 60s era 4 track reel 2 reel but it has lots of fiddling around to unpack & set up so I copped out and used my mid 80s Yamaha 4Track cassette studio machine as it's less faff and still in 100% working order.
I ran a mix through it & back into Reaper with the Yamaha pres cranked so that everything was in the red all of the time. The mix came straight off the heads & into the Reaper project.
I ran the tape at high speed - no need to drown in hiss and lost top end.
I repeated this with the same settings but with Dolby engaged...encoded and not decoded as well.
Interestingly BOTH accentuated a specific single stick hit & made it sound like a click but that's neither here nor there.
The NON dolby version, when blended in, added something and some extra kick thud.
The Dolby'd version added some top end, as expected, that sounded nice enough with something across the rest BUT accentuated the kick click which I EQ'd away.
Here're two mixes: no tape & tape with dolby blended in.

NO TAPE

APPARENTLY050425NOtape.mp3

TAPE+DOLBY

APPARENTLY050425wtape.mp3

Is it worth the effort? I don't know. Using the Dolby aspect really comes across like doing the Motown Exciter thing, (BOOSTED top end & CRUSHED dynamics), blend for vocals.
Do your ears tell you anything?

[vomitHatSteve]

I think overall, it's mostly muddying up the high mids.

That said, I could picture you using it as an effect on certain channels. Vocals, especially. Your usual chain has a very digitized sound, but if you used this to round off those harsh edges, it might have good effect.

[rayc]

I think overall, it's mostly muddying up the high mids.

That said, I could picture you using it as an effect on certain channels. Vocals, especially. Your usual chain has a very digitized sound, but if you used this to round off those harsh edges, it might have good effect.

Yeah,
it was even less impressive without the Dolby in line.
The amount of processing on this song's is horrid but necessary as what was provided was noisy, very pitchy and had extraneous sounds as well.
These days when I have well recorded vocals all I do is some manual de-essing. I did notice the vocals on this sound worse after the tape was added but I'll give it a burl on one of mine that is badly sung, pitchy as hell and awful but is cleanly recorded before processing.
Thanks Steve.