Harmonic distortion is the sound that is always there if we send our audio signal through any hardware processor of any kind. It might be subtle in some cases, but it will be there. Now that may seem like a bad thing – the whole emotional response to the word “distortion” and all. But there are lots of hardware devices – compressors, EQs, preamps, etc. – that imparted a desirable character to audio with its unique kind of harmonic distortion.
Then when everything went into computer-land, and it became more difficult or in some cases pointless to use hardware effects, getting those sought-after bits of audio character from popular hardware device-generated harmonic distortion became a problem.
But now that computer processing power is better and hardware simulation plugins (software that sounds like the origianal hardware – well as much as possible) are getting better, we can start to impart those “good” harmonic distortions to our digital recordings.
Here is an article about this from Nantho on Audio Fanzine: http://en.audiofanzine.com/recording-mixing/editorial/articles/getting-acquainted-with-harmonic-distortion.html
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