Digital Saturation?

Probably not the place to ask this, but I'm too lazy to search through gearslutz and see if anybody else has asked. Are there any methods of digital recording or processing that introduced colouration to tracks, like what happens with transformers, tubes, tape, etc? Was just wondering. edit to clarify, would there be anything apart from sample rate reduction? Any early digital gear from the 80s/90s that somehow introduced coloration? Or would sample rate reduction really be the only thing? EDIT 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO I really can't get this right. Coloration from the early digital gear probably would have been from a low sample rate. I'd like to pretend I know what I'm talking about. Would anything else in the gear have done anything? An imperfect digital to audio converter?

EDITED Mar 9th 2020, 23:51

There are a lot of VSTs that emulate the behavior of tape machines, transformers, etc. But keep in mind that these are going to have a certain degree of inaccuracy to them...miniscule, in the case of the best plugs...because modeling hysteresis behavior is a bitch-and-a-half in digital coding. You can get VERY close...but never spot-on, since hysteresis curves are far better modeled in continuous analog voltage curves and not discrete digital steps. And it's a fussy enough principle that a little difference like that WILL make an audible difference, if done badly.

Funny...I still remember back in the 1970s and 80s when console makers touted the superiority of their transformerless circuits, especially the mic pres. But those were SO clean and SO exacting that they sounded dead as hell. Fact is, we LIKE a little bit of dirt in our sound; it's like ghost peppers, though...you only need a TINY amount.

Now, early digital...that's a bit different. Not only did you have different sample rates, you also had different bit depths AND you had a lot of different codec schemes besides PCM, and a lot of that early digital "character" comes from all of those things together. While we have the ability to easily sample-crush these days, we don't have any plug-ins that can emulate the different codec schemes to get that last ingredient in there. At least, none I'm aware of...