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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."
To those of you who are saying "BFD, nobody uses analog tape anymore", have a good look at the liner notes of one of your audio CDs (and don't you dare say "BFD, nobody uses audio CDs anymore."
Somewhere in those notes, there'll be a logo that says either AAD, ADD, or DDD. If your CD is either one of the first two, then the original instruments were recorded to 2" tape. If it's the second, then the 2" tape was mastered to 1/2" tape.
A LOT of professional recording studios still use this technology. For one thing, if you send too much signal into an analog tape, you get a nice sounding tape compression, whereas if you send too much signal into a ADC, you get really horrible sounding digital clipping.
\/me wonders what several hundred recording studios in L.A. are gonna do now.
Causation can cause correlation
The magic word is "restructuring".
Quantegy bought the reel tape business from AMPEX... and they're apparently failing as a company.
This will probably resolve itself as:
A) Quantegy gets its act together and the plant reopens, or
B) Quantegy goes under, plant is sold and it reopens.
As others have pointed out, there's still a significant pro market, and many audiophile types, so there's enough market for the right supplier.
Digital is better.
In every respect.
I am an audiophile, and If you are to play vinyl through headphones to someone in the next room they will not be able to tell the difference between the original source and a digital recording of the vinyl playback. A digital recording can have a superset of all measurable audio components - spectrum and amplitude.
And as for the aliasing of digital recordings, when the sound hits the air it IS analog it becomes analog. When you use very high quality digital audio recordings you can capture and reproduce sounds that begin to (and for all intents do) border on the limits of they physics of sound itself.
Digital is superior in every way to analog. it is a myth that a person can hear the difference in a sufficciently high sample-rate recording.
Imagine an analog recording like a wooden box. You can hold it and carry it around. eventually it will begin to wear and tear.
Digital is like the knowledge of how to build that box. everytime you want to use the box you can build it from scratch instantaneously and you have a perfect, brand new box.
Sure, it's made out of wood from a different tree than your last box - but it is in better shape and the wood which you construct it out is of the same type and is stronger since it is unworn.
Furthermore, with the eventual advent of exponentially more sophisticated computation we will see the ability to record sound and reproduce it in such a way that it could be called seamless.
This will be accomplished not by a direct imprint on some meduim, but via an informational representation (analogous to digital) which will so dwarf the capabilities of the ancient idea of analog recordings that those who said analog is superior will be gaffawed in a similar fashion as we laugh at the gentleman below for his statements.
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
- Marshal Ferdinand Foch [Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre] (circa 1911)
He was Supreme Commander of Allied forces, 1918
He held a similar attachment to the classical way of doing things and saw inherent superiority in his beliefs.
He was wrong for reasons blatently obvious from the perspective of the modern day.
No, irony would be an employee at OSHA dying in an accident caused by unsafe workplace conditions. This is just the radio media reporting on something having to do with outmoded audio tape. If they had claimed that the plant should have stayed open because reel to reel tape is an ideal medium for distributing radio content while they themselves don't use it, that might be considered irony.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
You don't have to agree, you're just totally wrong.
Analog storage is limited by the speed of the recording medium and the amount of surface area utilized to store the analog soundwaves (in whatever fashion).
Even professional recording gear resolves far less sound information than what digital audio gear can do... Sure, a standard CD is a pretty paltry 44khz/16bit. So crank it up to professional units... 96khz or higher, go to 24bit recording... Still not enough? Go even higher if you want, but you'd be deluding yourself if you think you'll hear the difference.
The sound quality that people tend to like in analog gear is a result of the imprecision of the devices. Signals tend to leak, get transformed and modified by the analog gear they pass through, and also as it relates to the environment the gear is in (RF interference, atmospherics, etc). Some would argue that it gives them a "wamer, richer tone", but it all boils down to analog devices not maintaining an exact representation of the sound they are conveying.
So yes, you probably can tell the difference, but what you're hearing isn't a result of the storage medium, but of interm processing and modification through imprecise devices.
If you were to take the same output of the analog tape deck and record it into a high-quality digital deck (at the aforementioned 96/24), then play both of those back, you'd never be able to tell the difference.
So, if you want to argue that you prefer sound processed through analog gear, that's just fine. To call digital "lower quality" is foolish.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
...primarily cost efficiency.
Labels don't give people a million dollars and say "come back when you're finished" anymore. They give you 2 months and $30k.
Faced with this, the goal becomes good quality quickly. Sure, people argue about the warmth and crispness of analog. But what most analog purists miss is the outright efficiency of digital recording.
If you've ever recorded a song, you know that no matter how good you are there is almost always a better take (with a very few exceptions). When that $30k is all you have, it is imperitive that the take be the best one.
With tape, it's take...stop...evaluate...rewind...record. And pray fervently you don't accidently overwrite something.
With digital, you can literally get 10 times the work done. takestopevaluatetakestopevaluate. There is no waiting, and if you screw up you hit 'undo'.
Even most of the folks that do have a million bucks and want to record onto analog promptly dump to digital for mixing. And the 'warmth' and 'crispness' of analog is largely a myth as of about 5 years ago (when ADATs started to die their long deserved death). Play a 2 inch recorded track vs a protools recorded track and 99.9% of the people out there will never know. A good producer/engineer can work wonders with good preamps and outboard gear.
So yes, it's a sad day...but not nearly as monumental as purists would have you believe. People who depend on this stuff for a living dumped this along time ago.