Unless you’ve actually used magnetic tape for recording, you probably can’t appreciate what a factor tape noise played in the recording process. Gain staging was critical in order to keep the noise at bay, but that was soon supported by the introduction of Dolby noise reduction in 1965, which lowered magnetic tape noise by 10 to 15dB. Before you knew it, Dolby Type-A noise reduction units were in studios everywhere, but like with all technology, talented engineers soon found new and inventive ways of using the Type-A units for new creative purposes that were heard on records by Queen, The Cars, Fleetwood Mac, and so many others. It’s difficult to find these old Type-A cards so you can reproduce the same sounds, and if you do they’re tricky to maintain, but Universal Audio has come to the rescue with a plugin version of the unit called the A-Type Multiband Audio Enhancer.
In simple terms, Dolby A used a multiband processor to reduce the noise by boosting the highs during recording, then doing the opposite during playback. Some engineers began to think, “What if during mixing we used this in encode mode to boost the highs of certain tracks?” The results were magic, and can be heard on lead and background vocals, drums, and individual instruments of all sorts of records from that era. This is something that we used to call “stretch,” by the way.
Let’s Look At The Plugin
The UAD A-Type Multiband Audio Enhancer was made to loosely look like the old Dolby A units, and can even precisely emulate the noise reduction function, but it has so many more variables making it much more functional in the way we work today.
The original unit had 5 multicolored pushbuttons that were used for testing and calibration of the unit. A-Type renames these Excite, Expand, Air, Crush, and Gated. There are also large Amount and Mix controls, as well as a three position Sidechain Filter and a switch to change the old Dolby-style meter to view either input or gain reduction.
At the bottom of the plugin you see an emulation of the the old Cat 22 cards that were the heart of the unit. These cards were easy to modify, which studio techs did with regularity, so many studios might have a dozen modified cards for different sounds.
This too can be emulated if you dig a level deeper into the plugin to find the Custom Circuits display. This allows you to further control multiband gains and crossovers, Ratio, Knee and Attack, and sidechain filtering.
I’m Excited
The Excite mode is probably the one most often used (followed by the Air mode), and once you hear it, you’ll recognize the sound on all those old classic records from the 60s and 70s. It’s equalization, but not something easily emulated with a standard EQ since there’s also a lot of 4-band expansion going on at the same time. As you would imagine, Crush mode can be used for a little extra something on drums.
There are so many plugins available these days that it’s difficult to justify adding another one, but A-Type does something that you won’t find anywhere else except with the original hardware. It’s the sound of classic records, and if that’s something you’re after, then this is definitely one to add to your digital tool box.
UAD A-Type Multiband Audio Enhancer sells for $199. Be aware that it only works in conjunction with UAD Apollo hardware. You can find out more here, or watch the video below for more info and a listen to what it can do.
