I've been hunting around and can't seem to find an answer to the following question:
Does the OP-1's tape speed setting do anything /other/ than adjust the sample rate?
The reason I ask, is that I've been recording at lower speeds to increase available time (and that nice high-end rolloff), however I'd like to transfer the final track to my computer via USB. If the tape speed is only adjusting the sample rate, I can run it back up to 100%, dump to album, pull into a DAW and then reduce to the recorded sample rate without any loss in the middle. If not......what exactly is going on here?
it reduces the tape transport speed i.e. sample rate for playback and recording, effectively gives you what you’re looking to do.
sometimes it introduces subtle bugs e.g. clock drift etc but there isn’t much specific information, and you could use those creatively anyway
This actually doesn’t address getting it back down to a slow speed once it’s transferred to the PC. I foraged ahead though and just tried it. Everything sounded great! It seems that it really is just lowering the sample rate without any additional processing.
Interestingly, though perhaps not surprising, bus reverb recorded at 100% speed still sounded good when resampled to a lower rate.
it doesn’t need to do any processing other than interpolation when replaying it back, which barely needs more than one sample in advance anyway. you can slow it down once in your DAW by turning off stretching and pitching it down to what it was pitched down on the tape transport when recording - for 50% it’s an octave down, for 25% it’s two, etc.
it doesn't need to do any processing other than interpolation when replaying it back, which barely needs more than one sample in advance anyway. you can slow it down once in your DAW by turning off stretching and pitching it down to what it was pitched down on the tape transport when recording - for 50% it's an octave down, for 25% it's two, etc.
Perfect, that lines up with what I’m seeing on my end. Luckily my daw can stretch by semitones, so I can just match that up with the OP-1 without issue.
I’m guessing - from my limited experience with the microgranny and Axoloti - that sample rate reduction is actually pretty simply to implement in digital systems like these? It seems to be the “first” thing to add to an Arm chip device, so I’m guessing it must be easily implemented.
That said, the SR reduction is 10000% better and cleaner than the microgranny - more than a 5th down on the MG and it turns into a gritty soup pretty quickly. Low bit depth wouldn’t help this either I suppose… interesting to think about!