Last Manufacturer of Pro Analog Audio Tape Closes

goosman writes "Quantegy, the last manufacturer of professional reel-to-reel analog audio tape in the world has closed their plant in Opelika, AL leaving a reported 250 workers without jobs, according to the Opelika-Auburn News. Emtec (the former BASF, which used to be AGFA) was the last European manufacturer and ceased manufacuring in 2002. An audio account of the closing can be heard at NPR."

Comments

Great story

[SIGALRM]

Almost 60 years ago, the story was different. "In 1945, after capturing several German 'Magnetophon' tape recorders from Radio Luxembourg, the American Signal Corps recorded a speech by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to be played to the people of occupied Germany. Due to a shortage of recording tape, the speech had to be recorded on a reel of used German tape. Due to a problem with the German tape recorder, the tape was not completely erased and the voice of Adolph Hitler was intermittently heard along with Eisenhower's voice. This caused a great deal of fear and confusion among the German people

Wouldn't you have loved to be there for that little mishap? Here's a little more info on that story in case you're interested.

Re:Damn

[Jeffrey Baker]

Cheap studio gear can write "24/96" all over the package but achieving that accuracy digitally is very difficult and expensive. Most low-end equipment I've managed to peek inside of contain poorly implemented clocks. In a digital system the timebase is the most important factor, but Edirol and that crowd spend $0.10 on the clock. A good clock would make "96kHz" closer to the truth, but then it wouldn't be $199 anymore.

An actual 24-bit system has a theoretical Dynamic range of around 140dB but you'll be hard pressed to get better than 80dB with most gear. With analog recording there are at least two well-known foolproof methods to improve dynamic range and SNR: get a bigger tape, and run the tape faster. The dynamic range and SNR on 2", 32ips tape is amazing.

And of course tape can be driven to +9dB recording levels in some cases, but a digital system will clip hard at 0dB.

Digital is definitely the future but right digital recording has its problems. Next time you go to the record store notice how many High Resolution DVD-Audio recordings are being mastered from tapes.

Re:250 people lost their jobs?

[ThJ]

Much more happens in a tape recorder than just the addition of noise. There is something called warping, that is inaccuracies in the speed the tape passes the playback/recording heads. There is crosstalk, that is mixing of audio across several channels. There is also the fact that the signal is being recorded with a bias to bring it into the most linear part of the tape. And then there's the most noticable effect: Compression. When you over-record a tape, you get compression, that is reduction in audio levels compared to the original levels. A digital recorder will just clip, sounding horrible. A tape recorder will do it more gently. Modern musicians and technicians are very fond of what's described as vintage sound. I need just mention the UREI LA-2A compressor, an opto-electric tube compressor, used on numerous recordings. I dare bet anyone who has ever listened to recorded music has heard the handywork of that machine, or it's digital emulations. I love the sound of warping, especially when it comes from record players. It's what I call a becoming untunedness or unstability in pitch. Creates a warm fuzzy feeling inside of me, at least. Tube equipment is popular for grunching things up a bit, the newest Korg synthesizer model, a purely digital machine in all other aspects, has a tube stage for adding an edge to the sound. Guitarists unanamously agree that tube amplifiers give the best sound... I can go on and on... But it's a part of musicians' culture, basically.

Re:Damn

[puetzk]

Yep. And sampling @96kHz gives you response up to 48kHz (in theory, though in principal it the last parts suffer from intonation problems if there's any jitter at all to your sampling or reproduction clock.

Frequency distribution is a nice sharp spike at n Hz...
| |
| |
|_______|__
n

So we'll sample at 2n Hz

_ _
/ \ / \ - forgive the ascii art and
\_/ \_/ pretend that was a sine wave

_|__ __|__ - sampled at 2n Hz
| |

We'll even pretend that the studio gear sampled it perfectly (no clock jitter) since that gear
is likely pretty damned good. So our digital signal is +1,-1,+1,-1 just like it should be

But now we play it back on a cheapo walkman that doesn't have a perfect clock, so what it synthesizes is

_|_ ___|_ _
| |

and after filtering, the analog signal it produces now looks like this
_ _
/ | _/ | - again, forgive the ascii art,
|_/ |_/ but clearly it has steeper
sections and shallower ones
so it's no longer a pure tone

So the frequency distribution now looks like

|
| |
|_____|_|_|
n

it has some frequency content to both sides of the 'real' signal (how much and how far depends on the amount of jitter present). Obviously, the signals very close to the nyquist limit suffer most from this - the lower pitches get to average the wave-shape out over multiple samples, so they will not spread out as much in the freuency domain if a point is a little off in time. But this is why the nyquist limit is not the whole story. Along with the fact that no filter is a completely sharp dropoff, this is why CD's lowpass filter to <20kHz, not at the 22050Hz Nyquist limit).

Sampling beyond 96kHz is not (yet, anyway) mainstream gear. So I think the grandparen't claim that digital equipment works to 48kHz, but has a hard time as that limit is approached is pretty fair - that's the theoretical limit (for prosumer-grade stuff), and in practice it will have trouble near the edge.