AnalogEntropy brings organic character to your tracks by recreating the subtle imperfections of vintage tape machines, analog consoles and classic hardware that give analog recordings their warmth, depth and soul.

It can be used on anything from a single track to the entire mix. For best results, use several parameters gently rather than pushing one too far.

You may not notice it. Until you bypass it.

Key Features:

COLOR:

• Drive: ANALOG PREAMP SATURATION: two-zone soft clipping, from gentle tape preamp rounding to heavier saturation.
• Warmth: TRANSFORMER HARMONICS : even-order harmonics (2nd, 4th) filtered below 280 Hz, the signature of an analog transformer.
• Saturation: DYNAMIC TAPE SATURATION : envelope-following tape saturation: peaks compress harder than quiet passages, like a real magnetic tape under heavy signal.
• Air: HARMONIC EXCITER : harmonic exciter à la Aphex/BBE: generates new harmonics above 3.5 kHz rather than boosting what's already there.

MOVEMENT:

• Haze: BBD CHORUS : BBD chorus with two interacting LFOs, the technology behind 1970s tape echoes and classic chorus pedals.
• Sway: HARMONIC DETUNING : three drifting delay taps creating internal harmonic beating, like a piano whose strings have slowly gone out of tune with each other.
• Flutter: TAPE FLUTTER : tape flutter with filtered noise injected into the LFO phase, so it never sounds like a mechanical sine sweep.
• Warp: APERIODIC MODULATION : sslow, unpredictable phase modulation, the kind heard on degraded tape or off-speed playback.

IMPERFECTION:

• Dropouts: RANDOM SIGNAL DROPOUTS : partial random signal fades with independent L/R asymmetry, simulating uneven oxide wear on a playback head.
• Crackles: VINYL NOISE : granular noise texture, crossfaded grains of 30–80 ms with independent stereo seeds.
• Hiss: ANALOG TAPE HISS : warm band-passed tape hiss from dual noise sources with a slowly evolving spectral blend.
• Drift: TAPE WOW & FLUTTER : tape motor instability modelled as a slow sinusoidal wow at ~0.6 Hz combined with a filtered noise flutter.

SWITCHES:

• Vintage: LPF at 13 kHz, S-curve waveshaper and light quantisation at 30 kHz, narrowing the frequency response like a well-maintained 1970s tape machine.
• Bleed: console crosstalk at −2.5 dB with early reflections at 8 and 13 ms, the natural channel contamination of an analog desk.
• Spread: 5 ms delay on the right channel only, the looseness of two slightly misaligned tape heads.
• Smear: temporal blur that rounds transients and pushes the signal back from the source.
• Buzz: 50 Hz + 100 Hz hum modelling a slightly misgrounded tape deck or console.

MODEL:

• Six converter and tape characters ordered from cleanest to most extreme:
  • Akai S900 (12-bit / 40 kHz, clean filter).
  • E-mu SP-1200 (12-bit / 26.4 kHz, coloured LP, low-mid punch).
  • E-mu Emulator II (10-bit / 27.7 kHz, warm reconstruction).
  • Mellotron (tape saturation, wow/flutter, 8 kHz roll-off).
  • Casio SK-1 (8-bit / 9.38 kHz, heavy quantisation noise).
  • AM Radio (300 Hz–6 kHz bandpass, AM demodulator saturation).

EQ / MASTER:

• Bass / Treble: bipolar vintage tone stack: the cut side behaves passively with interacting bands like a real amp, the boost side is active.
• Blend: global dry/wet after all processing.
• Glue: analog bus compression curve, transparent below halfway, character zone above with harmonic saturation on transients.
• Output: final gain with auto-gain calibration.

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