> Since digital became the norm for music production, there has been a persistent cry from analogue die-hards and audiophiles that digital just doesn’t cut the sonic mustard, with one adjective being mentioned more than any other: warmth. But what is warmth, and why is it such a big deal to your reputation if your recording isn’t deemed to have it?
Ask ten different engineers, and you’ll get ten different answers, because it’s not an easy thing to quantify. But one thing is for sure: analogue signal paths add impurity and a level of distortion to the signal, which our brains broadly perceive as a nice ‘fuzziness’ around the sound we’re focussing on. In plugin terms, it’s become the pursuit of many audio software companies to effectively mimic that effect, and there have been some incredible successes in this realm in recent years, in the guise of both synth-based plugins and audio effects.
But what, you may ask, if you could take this concept to the next level and
