Virtual tape machine plugins will never sound like tape

… because the best part about recording to tape is not what it adds, but what it doesn’t take away.  

Sure you can use a tape plugin to add noise, distortion, head bump, saturation, flutter, eq anomalies, etc, and sometimes those processes can make a source sound subjectively better.  But no process can undo what’s lost in the initial conversion from analog to digital.  Good argument here for using the best converters possible.

A corollary to the above is that re-recording a digital source back to tape in the mastering process does not have nearly the same benefits as mastering from an analog tape derived from an analog source.  In fact more often than not a tape layback of a digital source sounds no better than the source, and often worse.

Tape is best used when recording a source that is going to be in the analog domain anyway, not to add “that tape sound”, but to preserve the real analog sound of the source:

1. tracking
2. output of an analog console
3. output of analog mix buss processing (instead of back into Pro Tools)

In the case of 2 and 3 the tape is what should be delivered to mastering.  Re-recording the tape back to digital defeats the purpose.