I like to slightly overdrive a tape machine, the whole idea is to produce overtones so that people with shitty speakers can actually hear something, like if I hook my TR-808 up to a shitty sound system directly and tune my bass drum from high to low (I have an external tuning mod) you will hear a peak in volume then it will drop back down then oscillation followed by nothing, the same shit applies to those of you using a synth sub bass instead of pre-processed 808 samples like Tape 808, while monitoring without a decent sub you are not going to get an accurate representation of the bottom end without adding harmonics.