is there some way I can slow my 38 down to 7.5? Or would I be better to let it be?
Personally I wouldn’t recommend trying to make your 38 sound like a 388, but for certain instruments or effect, saturation is something to have in your bag of audio tricks.
Tape saturates at lower signal (or flux) levels with lower tape speed because you have less tape area and thus less magnetic particles for a given duration of music. I’ve used 7-1/2” ips speed on mastering decks to take the edge off of commercial CDs I bought that were basically unbearable to me due to digital artifacts. I would then transfer the music back to CD from tape, and voila! I had a CD I could tolerate. Not all CDs required such drastic measures, but some releases that sounded peachy previously on vinyl were just garbage on CD. I learned to see the “Digitally Remastered” label like skull & crossbones… something to avoid rather than something to make me more likely to buy it.
The key in this case is to use tape to “smear” things a bit. 15 ips half-track was too clean to do any good when I was trying to salvage those harsh sounding CDs. However you can also hit the tape harder @ 15 ips for similar effect, which will work a bit better on the narrower tracks of the 38 compared to half-track. Total tape area at a given flux level is the main factor in tape saturation. So narrower tracks will saturate at lower levels as will slower moving tape.
The 388 can be very clean. Clean and warm are not at opposite ends of the spectrum. IMO many people today and for some time now incorrectly characterize digital as clean, when more accurate terms would be thin or metallic. With digital the individual instruments do tend to seem more separate in their own spaces, and that sounded cool at first because it was different. But when you think about it that’s not how live music sounds. It blends together and IMO that’s part of what makes analog tape sound more natural.
Tape can be as detailed and clean as you want it to be and at the same time it still has that life about it we all know and love. Or you can really grunge things up, but you do that deliberately for effect. Use a lower MOL tape like 406 instead of 456 and you can achieve a bit more musical distortion as well. But use the higher output tapes like GP9 and ATR and good luck getting anything out of those but crystal clear. Either that or your electronics will clip before the tape gives you any audible distortion… and that’s not the kind of distortion you want.
Higher flux levels also reduce high frequency response… another reason low-speed narrow track sounds warmer. The high frequencies on the 388 top out around 16 kHz before falling off. The same tape @ 15 IPS would be closer to 20kHz. Frequency response is often measured at -10 dB at lower speeds because it looks better on a spec sheet. An honest spec sheet will give you frequency response numbers for -10 VU and 0 VU. The closer to 0 VU and beyond the worse the high frequency response will be.
The 388 is 30Hz -16kHz +/- 3dB. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing above 16k, but it does drop off sharply from there. And it gets even more complicated because those measurements are for a specific tape… in this case TEAC YTT-8013, which is pretty close to Maxell UD. Maxell XLI, Quanegy 457, 407 and Scotch 207 are all better tapes than the Teac YTT-8013 used to measure frequency response, so you can get better than factory performance from the 388 with higher quality tape.
Something that really works well with narrow track machines with dbx if you find the sound a bit dark for your taste is the BBE Sonic Maximizer. I’m not into magic black boxes generally speaking, but this is no gimmick. I have a second-generation unit, the Model 422 I bought new late 80’s and I wouldn’t mix without it.
Another thing when working with dbx is too turn down the high frequencies on tracks that contain things like bass and kick. Some people complain about “pumping” and “breathing” with dbx. Well attenuate the freakin’ high EQ on those freakin’ tracks! There’s nothing up there that does anything for bass instruments anyway. Since dbx is a broadband compander it opens up the whole frequency spectrum when decoding those tracks, including tape-hiss frequencies. And that’s one reason people complain they can hear dbx working, but what’s not really working is the technician’s grasp of how dbx works and what instruments occupy what range in the audible frequency spectrum. User error strikes again and the device gets blamed.
... also, I was thinking maybe it sounds "tube" like to some people because there is basicly nothing coming off the tape over 12K?
Although, maybe that's not a big deal in my case.
I did the mosquito test online recently with headphones and my hearing rolls off pretty quick adfter that anyhow.
yikes!
See above. The 388 has a freq response of 30Hz - 16kHz +/- 3db and that's measured with a fairly average tape. Use a better tape and it should exceed that a bit. But yeah, most adults can't hear much over 16k anyway, and that's fine because most musical instruments don't have anything much above that anyway, including harmonics. So it’s all good.
