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

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

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.