Tape delay tape saturation

[rainstick]

OK, im fairly new to the whole ' saturation ' thing but have been playing about a bit in Logic using the tape delay...

What exactly is tape saturation, ? I understand that it's distortion resulting from overdriven tape (magnetic strip running out of thing's to magnetize or what not) But essentially is it the addition of harmonics, ? I don't follow what kind of harmonic's there are / should be ( even, odd? ) Or how to tell what kind of harmonics are being given as a result of distortion...

Which parameter are you meant to adjust in the tape delay to provide the saturation,? By increasing feedback you get additional harmonics as well as when you lower the distortion level slider... ( is the feedback slider just layering the signal meaning there's a greater amount going into the distortion level ? seems to be... )

Also - im having trouble finding out how many cents the LFO depth and the flutter intensity control's effect the signal by.... As well as what sort of waveform is used by the flutter rate ( the lfo seem's to be a sine whilst the flutter seem's to be random-ish)

i seem to remember the logic 7 manual going into quite a lot of depth on thing's, where as the 9 manual seems a bit s#!+.... Or am i missing part of it?

and i get that there are different types of distortion, but when people say tape saturation, are they basically just meaning over drive, ? or is tape saturation a specific sound (achievable in logic) that people know and use, ?

i just had an experiment with logic overdrive vs tape delay - and got the EQ that the tape delay creates (why does it do that when it say's 20 - 20 hz, ? ) using a match eq and some white noise ( attached image - although i had it set to 89 percent not 200, that was just so the curve was obvious)

i've attached the audio from the experiment... they sound pretty close to me, ?

i feel as though im kind of missing something and it would be great to have some input, cheers!

[fader8]

What exactly is tape saturation, ? I understand that it's distortion resulting from overdriven tape (magnetic strip running out of thing's to magnetize or what not) But essentially is it the addition of harmonics, ? I don't follow what kind of harmonic's there are / should be ( even, odd? ) Or how to tell what kind of harmonics are being given as a result of distortion...

Saturation is a form of waveshaping created by the addition of both harmonic and non-harmonic partials, and in some cases also attenuating the original signal. The level and relative frequency location of these partials changes based on what type of overdrive you want to emulate, eg tube, tape, transistor.

and i get that there are different types of distortion, but when people say tape saturation, are they basically just meaning over drive, ? or is tape saturation a specific sound (achievable in logic) that people know and use, ?

Tape saturation simply means that the algorithm is emulating the distribution (level and spectral density) of the added partials in the same manner that an overdriven tape head would. The real trick to getting it right is being able to faithfully emulate how that distribution changes depending on the signal level. It's easy to do on a static signal, but when the signal is dynamically changing, like music, it gets tricky.