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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."
Does anyone else find it ironic that NPR has posted a digital stream of this story about the analog tape industry?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Seriously, Quantegy was the last munufacturer of the 2" analog reel-to-reel tape that is used in high-end recording studios. And of the 1/2" tape used for analog mastering.
A dark day for those of us who loved the old analog sound.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
Eastman Kodak, the last remaining manufacturer of silver halide professional photographic film ceased production today, 1500 workers in Rochester, New York are now without jobs.
Maybe not today, but soon...
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
If there is a market for 1/4", Maxell will reintroduce XL. Or some Chinese plant will start making it.
Pro tape, especially 2", is staggeringly expensive. And it still offers some qualities of sound which take a significant effort to duplicate with digital. Yes, this is aberration, but it's a desirable *analog* aberration, and studios that use tape contribute sort of a gestalt to the overall product, an organic quality.
I'm a big fan of digital, and I don't really care about analog tape, but I do sympathize with the folks still using 1" and 2" decks.
Digital recording is only *just now* getting to the point where it can truly take over. (It's been there for playback for decades, sure, but production is another story.)
But it's always been expensive to do 2". In the day, we'd get tapes that had been used once in a voiceover studio and bulk erase them.
Oh well... I feel sorry for the plant workers and anybody still using an ampex console. Somewhere I think i still have a Teac 4-track 1/4", and boxes of unused, or only partly used, tapes. Ebay time?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Now that there are so many digital recording formats, with various numbers of tracks, it is essentially impossible to create legacy recordings. Many programs we use today won't even run in 5 years let alone 100 and all we will have is basic 2 track mixdown masters of many records.
With tape you could use whatever you wanted to record a record, it all got put to the same tape and in most cases the tape lasted a very long time, 50 years plus. Better yet, often times the recording equipment was better than the tape playback so as time went on you could get better sound off the same tape because technology had advanced. Digital is locked in stone forever, never to reveal any improvements. Even as a crude 2nd step backup there is the potential to bounce your multi-track masters to multi-track tape for preservation.
Steve Albini, one of the world's best recording engineers has a good lecture about the importance of tape here
one of my friends is a huge analog fan when it comes to his music making, all analog equipment, especially when it comes to sound processing and such, and he refuses to use computers in the process, but even he now uses a hard drive based 16-track recorder with a cd writer in it...previously he used a 4-track analog tape recorder.
analog can be of high quality, particularly when it comes to balanced signals and such for all your inputs...but analog reel to reel? I can definitely see why that's going.
First you got digital tape, of course DAT would be the most well known (at least it's the one I know) and while I doubt it can fill all the niches (particularly when it comes to multi-track recording) it can fill many.
That's not to mention a 24bit/96khz sound card can be had for mighty cheap these days...of course if you need one with 10 inputs it'll cost a bit more. This kind of technology can probably fill much of the demand for multi-track reel to reel recording...still change is never easy, especially when you're talking about hundreds of recording studios who probably use the stuff still...
I wouldn't be surprised if much of the cost of the upgrade would be negated by the fact you don't have to spend cash on tape all the time. Plus once it's in a digital format you can literally put it on anything, CD, DVD, tape, raid array, what not, and not have to worry about loss...of course this is assuming you're writing it on there uncompressed, or losslessly compressed.
farewell analog tape...
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
I have a really tough time believing that all of the analog tape ('pro gear' type, as measured in inches...ha) is going to be gone soon.
...I only wish I could be one of them. Analog recording offers so many advantages (read: quirks) to the producer/recordist...and not to mention the highest bandwidth available in analog audio media.
As an 'audio guy' I have encountered so many 'analog heads' that I think for the wound-up-no-clue-audiophile-asshole market alone this would be worth somebodies while to maintain.
Once again, before I ramble too far off topic... I don't believe it. There are far too many studios run by far too many producers which insist--for one reason or another (read: valid or not)--insist on nothing but analog...high quality analog....1" reels, 2" reels...1/2" reels....for mixdown, for final masters...etc. I simply do not believe it. Too many 'big name studios' operate with this techonlogy as the centerpiece of their of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. There's something to think about.
While I am continually saddened at the migration away for more sturdy analog ancestors of our current-day digital equipment, I simply do not believe that such a market--small but used to paying top-$$$ for everything....even tape--would be abandon outright.
I'm either in disbelief like denial, or disbelief like 'I genuinely don't believe it'
With tape you could use whatever you wanted to record a record, it all got put to the same tape and in most cases the tape lasted a very long time, 50 years plus.
This is true only in an optimal sense. In a very real and practical sense, it's not true at all. Many tapes are stored in only moderately optimal facilities, and a lot are stored in attics, sheds, and basements. A major scourge is the "Sticky shed" syndrome as described here, for example. while the old Ampex tapes were major culprits, in my own personal experience I have seen a large number and variety of tapes suffer similar fates.
Several months ago I had to resurrect a number of video tapes that had a similar problem. In short: tape is not as archival as vinyl. The question of archival quality audio reproduction is a hot topic being debated in library science. AFAIK, there have been no real concrete conclusions to the problem. From what I can gather, it seems very likely that the 21st century will simply disappear from history.
I hope that's not true, but there are an awful lot of extremely obvious and seemingly implacable problems facing archival audio and video storage.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I don't understand how the last manufacturer of this type of tape in the world could go out of business due to financial problems. If this type of tape really is still somewhat widely used as many people have noted, why didn't they just raise their price to whatever level they needed in order to be profitable?
While you have one very valid point that I can't argue--that digital audio will one day be 'nearly seamless'...and 'just about perfect'....it will have seams.
;)
I agree that one day--soon, at that--analog will be dwarfed in every way by what we do in the digital realm....it still won't be the same an equivalent analog counterpart...I'll let you choose what determines 'counterpart'
Analog is a continuous wave....digital is not. Period. Aside from the idiosynchrosies that make analog a great medium (creative) to work in, digital has that one drawback.
My point: For the love of God, man, do not confuse 'quality' with 'expense based level of accessability'.
To get an 'audiophile quality' analog reproduction you need to have the higest in quality--and highest in price--equipment. For digital the entry level is much lower.
My example: a $39 portable CD player (Via its line out) will have roughly the same (if not damn near identicle) quality output as a $1200 CD player....THD and frequency response being more limited by the output circuitry than any pickup circuitry.
it'd take (Est.) roughly $5000 worth of analog gear...(being just the turntable and tone arm) to reproduce that.
Take the high-end of analog audio....store bought vinyl reproducing ~60kHz signal, versus the high end of digital....DVD audio reproducing ~48kHz of signal...that's just the frequency...the real knock-out punch comes from the amplitude. The practically infinite variations between levels. As opposed to digital where it's quite tightly restricted. 16-bit audio (CD) does 65k discreet levels of amplitude....24-bit does 16.7mil. Quite a bit, yes....but, nowhere near par for reality, or even 'reference super-high-end-analog'
Yes, digital high-end is far more (economically) accesible...but analog high-end is far more 'real'....'hiss' aside
Where I'm going with all this: I am not going to run 2" tape to listen to the latest album by my favorite band....but I want the studio that records them to. I want that level of 'actual perfect' to exist in some form and to be one day accessible...even if for nothing more than being able to either archive it digitally (using the real top-shelf digital technology for later down-sampling to the lowest-common-denominator of digital playback tech)...or for actual remasterability in later years.
Remember: In the analog world, you CAN turn things up and down...in digital, all of it is artificial.
mod parent up.
...but you'll never beat that infinitely variable and infinitely dividable quality of analog.
Sure, my 96/24 pro-spec audio cards can record almost as well as my Tascam 4-track--think about that for a second--but, where is the cutoff and how sharp is the curve? (audio nerd joke)
I mean it in all seriousness....The 'as-good-as-it-can-possibly-get' analog technology stomps and huge hole in the 'as-good-as-it-can-possibly-get' digital technology. Period.
The second digital recording can accurately (read: perfectly) model the infinite level of amplitudinal variance granted to us by the analog domain...then I'll digress on this point. Even as a '95% digital' audio producer....and even then, I'm sure higher tape speeds and tape width would be an easy fix to stomp a hole in the digital champion.
It can end up being an infinite race to higher sampling frequencies.... (remember your nyquist in digital, half of the top sampling rate is your actual top end frequency...and lets not forget about filter rolloff....22k tops for good cards, in reality...fuck the spec sheet)
reminds me of that story when I was growing up (in the 70's, when tube vs transitor was getting to be in vogue).
the story goes that two engineers were arguing about the sound merits of tubes vs transistors. the tube guy liked the 'sound' of tubes and thought this was the correct sound. the transistor amp just didn't sound right to the tube guy.
the transistor guy went back to the lab and re-evaluated his design and changed a few things. he returned to the bake-off and gave the tube guy another listen.
"its sound great now! what did you do?" asked the tube guy.
"well, I analyzed the distortion, hum and feedback problems your tube amp had and I installed filters and network to create the same set of intermod and distortion you find pleasing"
morale: its not really the components, its the implementation.
that said, I'll take an average digital signal over even a high-end analog one anyday. noise, hum and distortion are NOT my friends.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Tom Scholz, legendary engineer/bandleader for hte rock band Boston, just last month gave an interview published at Gibson.com where he stated that he knew he was going to have to give up on analog reel-to-reel in the next year or two, because nobody would be manufacturing the tape anymore. He has switched to ProTools but hates it, and says he has to have an extra full-time professional engineer on his payroll just to operate ProTools. And he goes on and on about the specific limitations of digital recording (frequent computer crashes) and the digital medium, and the audible superiority of analog tape.
u re Template.aspx?articleid=175&zoneid=2- -
"Classic Sound of Boston is Still Tom Scholz, Still Recording on Tape"
http://www.gibson.com/absolutenm/templates/Feat
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The big problem here is that analog tape is the universal archival medium.
100 years from now, engineers will be able to play back 2-inch 24-track tape if it's been carefully environmentally preserved. But in 2104, who will be able to access and remix the individual tracks on an IDE hard disk of an elaborately mixed album recorded in Cubase SX 2.2 optimized for a Motorola G4 processor running Mac OS X 10.2? Nobody. All we will have, if we are lucky, is a 16-bit CD with a stereo mix.
In 1997 I interned at Crawford Productions, a huge broadcast post-production facility in Atlanta Georgia. The Martin Luther King Foundation brought in Reverend King's entire library of sermons and speeches, which were on 1/4 inch reel-to-reel and cassette, for archival restoration. While Crawford made DATs and CDs, they explained to the Martin Luther King Foundation that they were also re-copying everything to fresh 1/4 inch analog tape, and that this would be the preferred archival method and the tapes they should most jealously protect.
What now?
Yep. I used to work for a government agency that recorded missile telemetry on 1" 14 track analog tapes. If you stored them in a tightly controlled temperature/humidity environment they'd last a long time. The problem is that's relatively expensive, and it's not always clear what you most important reels are. We were asked to retrieve some data from a tape that was only about ten years old and it came off the reel like masking tape. We were able to restore them to a certain degree, but if it were audio it would have sounded like crap even after we were done. I had to clean the tape heads every 100' or so...
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Well, I have an old Revere machine. But all I listen to on it are the odd tapes I pick up at auctions.
I have a few good tapes. One is a 'Christmas 1954' tape, recorded by a geek-Dad. They hand the microphone around and all the family say what they got for Christmas. At the beginning the say 'and this, hopefully, will be syncronized well with the film.'
Definitely a 1950's AV-nerd geek event!
Also, some sound tracks of 'I Love Lucy' episodes, that might not even exist in any other form. Who knows...
It's a mono tape-deck and far more ancient than most Reel-Reel decks still in existence.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
I'm fully aware of the inconsistencies with analog recordable medium....and even given that, I still side with it. I know that every time you play it back you are helping degrade the quality of the recording....I know that 'magnetic media' is prone to a multitude of conditions...and will be imperfect from the get go.... ...but, it's hard to beat--even givin its very human-like inconsistencies and fallbacks.
...I've worked wonders remastering brutalized analog recordings....and worked wonders even I couldn't believe, but, for abused digital...while I've worked wonders, it still sounded like a finely polished piece of crap....caveat emptor
Having spent most of my teens, twenties, and thirties in recording studios (as a musician, engineer, producer, and owner), there's a lot I'm going to miss about analog recording on tape.
I'm not about to start the analog vs. digital flamefest. I see more good about digital than bad, but there are a few qualities of analog (particularly the last point above) that are worth preserving.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Something similar happens at the end of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Apparently, the master tape wasn't fully erased after its last use!
It's faint, but there's an unmistakable orchestral version of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" playing. Interestingly, both artists used Abbey Road studios. This analog tape _must_ be expensive if Pink Floyd had to resort to recycling!
Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
In theory. But you're not going to find any ADC's with enough dynamic range to actually do anything with digital post-processing. Think about what's going on with tape. You have non-linear smooshing of the wave form as the input reaches a critical value. This (by Fourier analysis) causes a shift upwards in frequency and (also by Fourier analysis) causes the maximum relative variation to decrease. (The maximum relative variation is the supremum of the absolute values of differences of waveform values in an interval). Now consider what a (linear) ADC is doing. It's sampling 44.1 or 96.whatever thousand times per second. Each sample consists of an input waveform measurement. You have 16 or 24 bits of accuracy to work with. That is a lot of dynamic range -- but you're still sort of screwed because if you try to do digital compression, you're going to end up with a bunch of data points in between bits. The obvious solution is to use non-linear weighting in your ADC. But this isn't going to work with ProTools or any other digital audio gear (without conversion to linear weighting, negating the benefits), and there's major inertia to deal with in the professional audio market.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Didn't sell.
Then, almost as a joke, he designed the Carver Silver 7 tube amp. 20 tubes per channel. $25,000 each. Two huge chassis per channel. Huge transformers. Same transfer function.
Named the "best amplifier of the decade" by The Absolute Sound.
Incorrect. The definition of irony is whatever someone reading the word irony understands it to be, no more and no less.
If I say IANAL or 1337, are you going to complain that it's not a real word? Why would you be concerned when the 10,000th person uses irony to mean coincidence? Have you not clued in to the Slashdot dialect yet?
Someone please mod me and the parent to which I'm replying off-topic so that others don't have to waste their time.