Stairway wouldn’t have been my next post, but good to know. 
I just tried to replicate what I think a typical eighties signal chain looked like.
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The synth being a mono audio source must have passed through some preamp. I chose one from Arturia that I drive a little bit.
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The single most important ingredient however is delaying one channel by 50 ms. You’ll hear that listening to the left and right channels of the original recording separately. One channel is pretty dry, the other one delayed, lower in volume, and with more reverb.
They panned the dry channel left and probably had reverb and delay on sends with the return of the delay panned to the right. My delay is the MDE-X from KORG but any will do. There are more songs that use this technique - I’ll show you more soon. -
I love the Lexicon 224 reverb so I used the Arturia LX-24. It’s also my send reverb in the global rackspace (not used for the example). It adds quite a bit of latency (3.2 ms), though, but I’ll show how I cheat to ultimately save these 3.2 ms again shorty.
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Everyone used the Roland Dimension D chorus back then so I put it in the chain. It’s one of few choruses with true stereo input.
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Any EQ will do - I have the free one by Melda, followed by some compression.
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Since at the end there must have been a tape recording machine, the audio passes through Arturia’s „Mello-fi“ which I love, too. It adds a little bit of saturation and - for the fun of it - noise…
Here’s the rackspace:
Van Halen - Jump (Florian).rackspace (58.3 KB)
