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

Irony

[Embedded Geek]

Does anyone else find it ironic that NPR has posted a digital stream of this story about the analog tape industry?

Damn

[the arbiter]

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.

Re:Damn

[uradu]

Oh, one more thing:

> Next time you go to the record store notice how many High Resolution
> DVD-Audio recordings are [being mastered from tapes].

You could have saved yourself the bit in brackets, because that's about where SACD and its competitor are. For audio purists at least, the sad fact is that the CD is the cat's meow to the VAST MAJORITY of people, and the remaining dissenters just aren't enough of a market. I doubt higher quality audio will make much inroads in the future except in niche markets. Yes, the CD will be displaced, but it will give way to medium agnosticity rather than higher quality. IOW, people will be buying music in all shapes and forms (increasingly online), the CD will be just one of the formats, and of ever decreasing importance.

Then again, maybe this trend will indeed facilitate higher quality audio. Since the software won't be bound to a particular medium anymore, new formats (such as SACD) won't have to reach critical mass anymore to survive. Studios can simply record everything at the highest rate, and then sell the audio at various quality (and perhaps price) levels. Since you're downloading your new album anyway, you can either buy the 96KHz 4GB version for $25, or the 44KHz 600MB version for $15, or the compressed-to-hell MP3 version for $10. It's up to you how you store and play it back. And the industry doesn't have to go through the risky business of pushing yet another audio format through. I'm not sure the labels are there yet mentally, though, since at the moment they still seem to think that the medium equals the music.

In other news...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

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...

Market demands

[fishbowl]

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?

This is horrible, tape is the only archival medium

[tentimestwenty]

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

as an audio guy...

[Daneurysm]

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.

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.

...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.

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'

Re:This is horrible, tape is the only archival med

[Ralph Spoilsport]

tentimestwenty wrote:

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

the old story of the tube and transistor

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

Re:the old story of the tube and transistor

[fishbowl]

The reality is in the dynamic domain -- you cannot afford 104 dB of dynamic range on tape. No, you can't. You can have it cheaply in digital.

So what does everybody do? They mix so that every track is in the top 4 bits, because people perceive "louder" as "better". But it totally eliminates one of the main things that makes digital superior. The order of magnitude higher dynamic headroom. Thrown away because "we" lack the taste for anything like a quiet passage or a subdued element in a mix.

I know of situations where 48kHz in the frequency domain is a problem, but none of them are musical in nature. 96kHz is enough of a sample rate for bat research, so it's plenty above the plateau of human proportions.

The fidelity problem is solved. What's a problem now, is the want of specific aberrations, say as in vintage gear, that need to be simulated with signal processing, and that's by nature going to be artificial. Whether it sounds artificial is neither here nor there. A tube simulator, ribbon mike simulator, analog filter simulator, or tape saturation simulator is synthetic, and nothing synthetic is perfect.

Good enough for production work? Certainly. Good enough that tube amps and tape decks and Telefunkens won't have a market? Wrong.

Tom Scholz, Rev. Martin Luther King

[wheatwilliams]

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.

"Classic Sound of Boston is Still Tom Scholz, Still Recording on Tape"

http://www.gibson.com/absolutenm/templates/Featu re Template.aspx?articleid=175&zoneid=2
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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?

Re:250 people lost their jobs?

[bob beta]

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.

Alas, poor Analog...

[ktakki]

...I knew ye well.

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.

• First of all, there's the act of opening a fresh reel of Ampex 456 tape -- the polymer scent, akin to the smell of a new car. You'd place the reel on the deck, thread it carefully, and then fast-forward to the end and rewind to the beginning. This would "seat" the tape so it would align with the transport. But it was almost a ritual act, the first step in recording a new project.
• After each take, the tape would have to be rewound, either to the top of the track or to the punch point. It was an enforced pause, a chance to let your ears cool off for a few seconds or a minute, maybe take a sip of coffee or beer. I'm not the only engineer who missed this.
• Flipping the reel: maybe once in a blue moon I'd lay a backwards guitar or piano track, or record some backwards reverb (one of my favorite effects). But when one of the channels on an old Ampex 24-track deck went south, flipping the tape and copying the track over to another track was our quick and dirty workaround (it was only a reference track anyway, and the deck was fixed the next day). Of course, nowadays we have hard drives and we all know that they never ever fail.
• Splicing: okay, I'll readily admit that in the early '90s Digidesign Sound Designer made me hang up my razor blade and splicing block forever, but it was a hell of a useful skill at the time. I had a lot of fun in the pre-sampler days making 1/4" tape loops (some of them were 20 or 30 feet long and ran around the room, using microphone stands as tensioners).
• The essential qualities of analog tape: head bump and tape compression. The first is really a quality of analog decks, a low-frequency emphasis between 60 and 200 Hz, where the belly of a kick drum sound lies. Tape compression allows you to selectively saturate certain tracks, like snare drum, where the effects of distortion actually work in your favor. Attempting the same thing with digital only leads to madness. Note that there's a DSP plug-in available for ProTools that simulates these qualities.
• Longevity: properly stored and cared for, analog tape lasts decades. Perhaps even a century or more. Sure, there was that problem with 3M reels and flaking back in the '80s, but that was nothing that an hour in a convection oven at 200 degrees couldn't cure (heh). I have reels from the '70s that I can still listen to. Compare this with my own personal dead media problem: I have to keep a Mac 512K running if I want to be able to access MIDI sequences I wrote back in the mid-'80s. The software won't run on anything past System 3.2, and the file format is proprietary and not published anywhere (Opcode Sequencer 1.5). I've done straight-through conversions to a standard MIDI file format, but you lose certain features that way (named tracks, loops, etc.). Without a standard multi-track digital audio format that works across platforms and software packages, one that can be perpetuated for decades, musicians, producers, and record labels will find themselves in the same conundrum. Remember that a tape recorded on an Ampex deck will (theoretically) work on a Studer, an MCI, a Tascam, or an Otari. Think 20, 50, 100 years from now. Think reissue, remaster, box set.

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.