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?

Re:Irony

[xjerky]

Well, at least it recursively explains why they had to shut down.

Re:Irony

[jaavaaguru]

My soundcard's not working. Does anyone have a copy of this story on reel to reel tape?

Re:Irony

[Tumbleweed]

Ironic, no. Logical, yes. Inevitable, certainly.

Re:Irony

[Dun Malg]

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

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.

Re:Irony

[tuxter]

I find it ironic that you use the word irony in relation to a metal oxide storage medium.....

Re:Irony

[jsdkl]

But where do you find analog media that'll beat 2" mag on a 16 track Struder?

As far as I know, it's pretty much impossible to get mag tape wider than 2" these days.

Re:Irony

[Stepping Razor]

Being english I find this "irony" concept difficult to understand. Are there any americans out there who could explain it to me?

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:Great story

[DakotaSandstone]

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

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!

250 people lost their jobs?

[sakusha]

I didn't know there were even 250 people who still used analog reel-to-reel tapes. Perhaps there were more people making the tape than using the tape.

Re:250 people lost their jobs?

[Squareball]

Those poor people.. how would they have ever seen it coming?

Re:250 people lost their jobs?

[jericho4.0]

Even the folks with ears have moved on. Digital was arguably inferior to high-quality analog in the early years, but there aren't many (working) engineers/producers pushing that anymore.

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.

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:250 people lost their jobs?

[poopdeville]

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.

Re:250 people lost their jobs?

[Sycraft-fu]

The big change was the advent of delta-sigma D/A converters. Old D/A converters didn't work very well because they tried to directly convert digital PCM sound. Well this meant that to get 16-bit sound (CD quality) you had to have a converter that could produce 65,536 discreet voltage states. When you ocnsider this was over a range of two volts or so, you see why this was a huge problem. It made a very harsh sound that people didn't like.

Well the answer to the problem came from high power vairable speed electric motors. With those you also need to regulate the voltage and it turns out to be a bitch to design a stepped system that does so properly, cheaply, and efficiently. So what they did is use a different kind of control, called pulse wave modulation, PWM. What you do is take a high frequency digital (square) wave that alternates between maximum and minimum voltage, and just vary the duty cycle to give you the level of power you want. The more pwoer you want in a given direction, the more pulses that direction you have. Turns out to be real efficient, and easy to make. Only downside is it makes the device whine at the frequency of the wave.

Well, this could be applied to audio as well. Simply vary the rate of pulse to control the output signal. The whining is solved by using a wave of sufficiently high frequency that it exceeds human hearing and speaker capabilities (usually in the MHz range). This proves to work extremely well, and eliminate the problems with digital sound. All corrent D/A converters I'm aware of use this method. You'll see it adverised at 1-bit DAC sometimes.

Some systems, like SDSD, forgoe the conversion process and store PWM directly.

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

[madprof]

That's the kicker. Analogue tape can produce a certain sound which producers sometimes love. It's not about the accuracy.
Having said this it can't be long before some manufacturer brings out a piece of software that can mimic the sound of analogue tape...

Re:Damn

[Atrax]

A dark day for those of us who loved the old analog sound.

It's OK, you can build a cheap simulator withtwo cell phones and a crinkly plastic bag.

(takes tongue back out of cheek)

Re:Damn

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You're wrong. There's a certain compression that highly-driven tape produces, which is much more complex than some lowpass filter.

Re:Damn

[Jeffrey Baker]

The finest consumer tape deck ever produced, the Pioneer RT-909, had a frequency response to 30kHz. Studio decks that record at 15 inches-per-second have response clear out to 40kHz and beyond. A CD has response to only 22.05kHz, and even studio digital equipment has a hard time working up to 48kHz.

Re:Damn

[limegreenman]

It may be one of those scenarios where they have enough stock to easily cover the market for the foreseeable future. For example, the plant that my preferred watermarked paper comes from has been closed for about 5 years, but they're not likely to run out for another 10 years or so based on current rates. I'm also aware of a whisky and a clothing-soap in the same situation.

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:Damn

[Jeffrey Baker]

Hello sir, I hate to break it to you, but the front-end analog electronics and jittering timebase on the Audigy limit it to dynamic ranges of around 80dB and SNR of around 60dB, giving about the same performance as a good 20-year-old cassette deck.

Re:Damn

[Dasein]

This is multi-track tape. So you need 32 cell phones and 16 crinkly plastic bags.

Re:Damn

[joshiz]

It is much better to record at a higher bit rate and then downsample at the last step. Most professionals do this all the time.

Re:Damn

[ajlitt]

Hear hear. Forget that most soundcards use cheapo oscillators. Forget even that the front end on most soundcards are crap. I wouldn't trust anything that sits inside the case of the RF bomb most people call a computer to produce anything of real quality.

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.

Re:Damn

[a whoabot]

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

That's is what it's all about: use.

Theoretically you can absolutely duplicate an analog recording sound in a way that no human can tell the difference. You can at least duplicate it in a way that recreates it when you transfer it to a CD later; this is necessarily true seeing as they're both are just accessible bits.

The thing is, how hard is it to do this, at least, right now? Ridiculously hard. There's no DirectX plugin yet, and it's a long, long, long, long way off.

Though analog can be expensive and tape is finnicky in it's own way, if you're looking for an "analog sound"(as you see written on oh so many digital devices) you'll find that a computer + sound card + pro tools is much more finnicky and/or expensive.

Not to mention that it's not nearly the same to work in front of a computer as it is to work in front of a reel to reel. Being 'virtualized' in the screen is a much different experience than merely being plugged in to a reel to reel. For an artistic process(I hope you're making art, otherwise I'll probably have a minimal interest in your music) these things are important for what you want to do. Even if digital offered a total simulation of analog, it's still just a simulation. Although a lot of Slahdot readers most likely apply a sort of functionalism to a lot that they do, artists are not all total functionalists, and for good reason. The non-functional difference between a simulation and the real thing can still be quite important. Even if just in the process. I don't like quoting it, but "the medium is the message" can be very true for many works of art.

Re:Damn

[Jeffrey Baker]

Almost every oscillator out there uses a quartz crystal connected to a 74HCU04 inverter and a couple of ceramic capacitors. Such a thing is an oscillator, and it has very good long-term accuracy, but it has atrocious jitter, on the order of tens of nanoseconds. A good implementation would have the quartz crystal, a common-base amplifier with PNP transistors, and its own regulated power supply, with the squaring of the signal being taken care of by a comparator or, in a pinch, an inverter. A good implementation can have jitter below 1ps RMS, or looked at another way, -120dBc phase noise 100Hz from the carrier.

Re:Damn

[Jeffrey Baker]

If you are going to publish at 44.1 you should probably record at 88.2 or 176.4, but asynchronous sample rate conversion has pretty good performance even for arbitrary conversion ratios. Look at the datasheet for AD1896, it can convert 96 to 44.1 with THD+N way down to -120dB or better. You could probably do better than that converting in software slower than realtime.

Re:Damn

[Jeffrey Baker]

I think you'd be surprised how hard it is to do digital properly. It isn't for lack of effort, as any number of dedicated amateurs will tell you. It's just that the state of the art really is 24-bits at 192kHz, and implementing something to that standard is very very hard, and expensive. Video conversion is fast, sure, but the sample sizes are small: 8-bit is standard, 10-bit is tough, and 12-bit is a miracle. Humans are also more willing to tolerate noise in video than in audio: a decent video DAC has -80dB noise floor, whereas a decent audio DAC like PCM1794 will have a noise floor at -150dB. That's a difference of more than 1000:1.

Timing is also much more important with audio than with video. People, for whatever reason, are not sensitive to timing jitter in a video signal, but are easily able to hear phase noise in a digital recording. Video uses faster clocks than audio, but their clocks are not as good (and don't need to be).

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.

Re:Damn

[ajlitt]

Ah bleed-through. It's to my generation what the pops in vinyl were to my parents. That and the Dolby test tones. And that special noise when the head crosses from leader tape to mag tape. And the SQUEEEEEEK-clunk of the auto-stop. And q-tips and alcohol cleaning sessions. And trying to find the best deals on XLII tape. And untangling a tape jam. And taking apart a cassette to splice out a crumpled segment.

Oh, you kids today, with your CD authoring programs, and laser cleaning discs. In my day, if your mix album went over time, it would just stop. And you'd have to take the tape out and turn it over and hit play again. And it would be a song you didn't want to hear, but you'd tough it out cos it was easier than trying to fast forward. But we liked it!

Didn't they used to be Ampex?

[BigBuckHunter]

Or did they buy the audio division when Ampex went to "Ampex Data Systems"? If I am to believe the article, then there would be no further sources of 2" reels. There are a lot of 24 track studios out there that still use this tech.

BBH

Re:Didn't they used to be Ampex?

[raeler]

That's okay, there's an entire decade of music reels that can be recycled. Finally, a use for 80's music!

Re:Didn't they used to be Ampex?

[javaxman]

There seems to be at least some supply of this tape around, though, some of it even still says "BASF" on it just one example. Google for "2 inch audio tape" for more.

So it appears there may be a reasonable supply of this stuff still around, and if they're "restructuring" maybe they'll make more before that supply runs out, but likely they were making _way_ more than demand called for, so... don't expect that $150 for 2500 feet price tag to drop when they do open their plant back up.

I don't know if "a lot" of those studios actually use this tape on a regular basis. "A lot" of those studios have had some really hard financial times over the past 10 years.

Re:Didn't they used to be Ampex?

[hawk]

Finally, a use for 80's music!

Now wait a minute, younster. 80's music already performed one of the most important feats in history: the end of Disco . . .

hawk, who remembers the horror

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...

May not be closed permanently

[eap]

The article says they're just closed for restructuring. This is vague, but it may not mean they are closed down permanently.

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?

Re:Market demands

[Jeffrey Baker]

Good reel-to-reel 1/4" decks fetch several hundred dollars on eBay, so you may as well. Collectors buy up recordings in that format, too, but most of the recordings currently offerend on eBay are complete crap.

I still use analogue tape!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at the BBC World Service, broadcasting in (approx) 42 different languages around the world - and we still use analogue tape for about 80% of our programmes! We are slowly being digitised, but believe it or not, analogue tape is great to work with, quick to edit, and extremely reliable, both for playback and archiving... I'm no luddite, but as someone who has to deal with on-air disasters, I know that tape recorders don't crash.... Our latest digital system runs on windows 2000... Say no more.

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

Everytime they change formats you have to upgrade.

[Momoru]

Great. Now I guess i finally have to upgrade to an 8-track.

welp, not too surprising

[Internet_Communist]

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...

Re:welp, not too surprising

[Daneurysm]

Reel-to-reel with a fat bandwidth (that you can actually measure with a ruler), and high inch-per-second rate is currently unbeatable in dynamic range and frequency response.

As the proud owner of 2 brands of 24/96 cards (the good ones...or I would have 'settled' for a much cheaper 24/192 card--you know who I'm talking about) I can honestly say that analog--even my limited 1/4" experiences--is far more flexible with signal, has far more 'air' to it--a sound guy term for something we can't quite describe...try if you must--can handle a steading hammering greatly in excess of +0db...and all you get is a nice saturation....natural compression practically....try that with digital.......I can honestly say that if this is indeed the truth, I'm not only dismayed but horrified.

Digital--no matter how sophisticated...no matter how high the sampling rate, no matter how deep the bits--is no comparison for super-highend analog tape.

...while you can pick up a 'good enough' or 'way beyond good enough' audio card for reasonable money--and 'pro gear spec' for much more money--it's damn impossible to get the same recording characteristics in digital.

Don't get me wrong, I've always 'done it digital', for nearly 13 years now...except for the 'accessible' (Read: affordable) analog tape I've had access to....which even then was shown to be far easier to work with....but...good god.....no more 2" tape!????? anywhere!??!?!?

If this is actually true--and I have many doubts that it is--well, then, this truely shows modern day mankind's ignorance...that, and savvy...in economic endeavors on "economy scale".

I don't know whether to 'tsk' at those who believe it, or the fact--if it is indeed true.

Where 2" reel-to-reel is used

[algae]

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.

Not dead yet

[jsdkl]

Open reel recorders are still in wide use and will be for some time still. This is just one plant (granted, the last one in the US) laying off its employees and going through Chapter 11 restructuring.

I have a few open reel recorders that get regular use, including a fairly new (less than ten years old) Tascam unit.

Analog audio recording is similar to motion picture film (I have some cameras for that, as well) - digital (so far) just can't compare. There's a special magic to it that can't be replaced.

Soft clipping in the digital realm

[tepples]

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.

That's why you use high-resolution ADCs and run them at a safe margin less than full scale. Then, when you load the file into your mixer, you take the arctangent of each sample to get soft clipping.

It's not the end, yet.

[Artful Codger]

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.

Random 4 Letter Names

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

From the post: the former BASF, which used to be AGFA

The company will just change names and start over again. The new name will actually be....

(..pulls four scrabble tiles at random..)

QMAZ!!!

Holy Cow! Triple Word Score!!

Re:Yikes

[deathcloset]

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.

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:Yikes

[AttillaTheNun]

Doesn't matter anymore, given the butchering job done these days at the mastering stage in the "Quest for the Loudest CD". They might as well record direct to 8 bit for all I care - it's not like they need the dynamic range these days.

Perhaps what they need is a mixing board with Volumes that go to 11 :)

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

OT: Recursion Joke in Data Structures Text

[Embedded Geek]

I have a well thumbed copy of Data Structures and Algorithms by Aho (the "a" in UNIX "awk," by the way), Ullman, and Hopcroft that I used for an algorithm class many moons ago. During the course, I spent a lot of time poking around the index looking for various things. I noticed the indexes' entry for "Recursive Procedure" includes the page number of the entry itself (see it here).

The best jokes are always the subtle ones.

Re:OT: Recursion Joke in Data Structures Text

[Aardpig]

The best jokes are always the subtle ones.

Indeed. On the cover of "Numerical Methods that Work", by Acton, the word 'Usually' is faintly embossed (but not inked in) between 'that' and 'Work'. Superb!

Re:OT: Recursion Joke in Data Structures Text

[lgw]

Looping and recursion are fundamentally the same thing - two ways of expressing the concept of repeated action. Recursive functions demand an exit condition no more (or less) than loops do.

Re:OT: Recursion Joke in Data Structures Text

[tootlemonde]

Looping and recursion are fundamentally the same thing...

Aho's book uses the same joke for "loop" in the index.

Perhaps, I should have said the joke was more of an example of iteration than recursion. Certainly, the repetition of the joke is.

Last manufacturer worldwide?

[SuperDry]

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?

Re:Yikes

[Daneurysm]

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.

So true...

[John3]

When I was at MIT (circa 1980) there was a recording studio down the hall from TMRC in building 20 (it was across the hall from an old anechoeic chamber...but I digress). The was pretty much abandoned and used by a small group of students for recording punk demos. The actual studio was isolated from the control room completely...the studio was on springs to completely prevent sound from bleeding through to the control room. The recorder in the control room was an old Ampex rack-mounted 2" 4-track machine...yes, FOUR-track. Recording at 15ips on 2" of tape yielded some incredible sound quality...think about later machines that squeezed 24 tracks of material on the same 2" of tape. In 1981 someone from Ampex contacted us and gave the group a new 1/4" 4-track so they could get the 2" 4-track for their museum. Seeing as how Ampex changed hands since then I wonder what ever happened to those vintage machines.

People used to buy those old Ampex machines just to get the tube pre-amp electronics...nice warm sound, pleasant distortion (when you wanted it), and no harsh digital clipping.

In other news...

[phud]

buggy whip manufacturers report record low sales for 2004

Re:Okay, how is the evolution of communication new

[Daneurysm]

mod parent up.

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)

...but you'll never beat that infinitely variable and infinitely dividable quality of analog.

Re:Yikes

[multiplexo]

Sorry, but i don't agree. Digital is a lower quality representation packaged in a more convenient format.. Nothing more. Nothing less.

And I CAN tell the difference.

Christ, more luddite horseshit from another "audiophile". Can analog recordings be better than digital ones? Certainly they can, in the early years of the CD revolution a lot of CDs were remastered with the RIAA equalization curves that were used to master LPs, which meant that you superimposed an unsuitable equalization curve over a media that had essentially flat reproduction, which made it sound like crap. As engineers got more used to digital music this became less and less of a problem (although it's been replaced with the "let's master this fucker as loud as we can" problem). But as far as the supposed superiority of analog to digital give me a break.

Let's look at some of the fun artifacts you get with analog media such as LPs (I assume that you're referring to LPs because most of the "audiophiles" out there turn their noses up at commercially mastered cassette tapes). With LP playback you get to deal with cracks and pops caused by static on the record, wow and flutter from your turntable, cracks and pops caused by dust on the record. Now, if you keep your records clean and maintain your stylus and go through all of the happy horseshit that owning a turntable requires you can minimize this. But then you also have to deal with the fact that unless you're buying quality pressings, such as those from the Nautilus SuperDisc line of recordings or the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab Original Master Recording series or their later Anadisq 200 series, the stock used to press most vinyl recordings was utter crap, which limited the ultimate quality of any vinyl pressing right out of the box. Then of course there's the fact that every single time you play that record you degrade its quality. Strangely enough though most "audiophiles" who disdain digital aren't consistent with their LP collections, if they were, and if their ears were as good as they claim, they'd have to toss an album out after say a dozen playings since its quality would have degraded.

As far as being able to tell the difference, a claim which so many "audiophiles" have made I'm sure you can. The vinyl recording is going to have less dynamic range, it has to because if it has too much dynamic range the stylus will pop out of the groove. What most audiophiles completely ignore is the fact that the pure music they claim to love so much has had the living Jesus processed out of it before it even hits the master. The frequency response is going to be different because of the preemphasis and deemphasis that the RIAA equalization, which was designed to deal with the mechanical limitations of the turntable, will not produce completely flat playback.

I would love to see an ABX comparison where "audiophiles" who claim to be able to tell the difference between digital and analog and prefer the latter, were put into a listening room. They would listen to a recording of either a compact disc played through an equalizer to degrade the sound quality, change the frequency response and reduce the dynamic range or a standard LP. I'd be willing to bet that without too much tweaking on the CD side of things you could make the CD sound like an LP recording to the golden ears of all of the supposed "audiophiles" out there. Perhaps someone should make a box that plugs in between a digital source such as a CD player and the pre-amp that does exactly this and then charge "audiophiles" out the wazoo for it. Sure, some people might claim that taking their money with a scam like this is wrong, but "audiophiles" are such suckers and easy marks that it's almost wrong not to take their money away from them.

Re:Yikes

[Nogami_Saeko]

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.

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.

Re:Yikes

[dimethylsulfoxide]

Yes, but can you play it back with a straight pin and a paper cup like vinyl records?

A good nuclear EMP will render digital playback equipment useless and erase magnetic media.

Re:Okay, how is the evolution of communication new

[jejones]

...but you'll never beat that infinitely variable and infinitely dividable quality of analog.

Um...if memory serves, magnetizable objects are made up of a bunch of little regions, called "magnetic domains," that are like little magnets. (A magnet just has the magnetic fields of the domains all lined up rather than in random directions.) These domains aren't infinitely small, just as photographic film suffers from grain. (Hence the cranking up of tape speed for higher fidelity, increasing the domains passed over per unit time.)

Also, it's not clear to me that an analog medium can be written to or read with infinite accuracy--but I hope someone more knowledgeable than I am can expound on that.

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
------------ -

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:This is horrible, tape is the only archival med

[tsotha]

A major scourge is the "Sticky shed" syndrome

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...

Bender: Now that is irony.

[Cumstien]

REAL ROBOT DEVIL

You'll give me your hand in marriage!

REAL HERMES

Is this really happening or just being staged?

REAL FARNSWORTH

It can't be real.

REAL AMY

Not if Leela is engaged.

REAL LEELA [to Robot Devil]

That isn't what I meant.
That isn't what I signed!

REAL ROBOT DEVIL

You should have checked the wording in the fine - print.

REAL LEELA [reading contract]

I'll give you my hand-

REAL LEELA AND ROBOT DEVIL

In marriage.

REAL BENDER

The use of words expressing something of the other than the literal intention.
Now that is irony.

Re:Yikes

[SunFan]

Oh God, an audiophile flamewar. Slashdot editors, delete this thread, now! Oh no...it's too late! I'm melting....I'm melting....

Re:Okay, how is the evolution of communication new

[Daneurysm]

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

The other thing...

[Jarr]

I personally am kind of relieved. I think that the thing that most people are missing, is that the real issue is not about the tape, but about the playback machines.

I work at an archive, and all I do all day is restore, preserve and digitise stuff on 1/4" analogue tape. Obviously the fact that there's no more tape being made is not really a huge issue for us, as we don't record to it anymore.

The real issue is that very shortly Studer, (one of the largest tape machine manufacturers) is stopping ALL support for ALL of their tape machines. This includes making parts or full machines. The machine sitting next to me right now (Studer A810) is running for at least 4-5 hours a day, and was already second hand when we got it. We have 10 or so machines in the same situation. These things don't just run for ever. They are extremely complex machines with many moving parts that just wear out after a while, and it's becoming very difficult to source replacement parts, not to mention people with the skills to keep them running properly or to do repairs.

I just hope that people copy their stuff to another medium before their machines stop working; which may be sooner than they think. What use is a "warm" analogue recording medium if you can't record to it?

How To Satisfy The Irony Police

[Zach Baker]

I see that people have criticized your use of the word "irony." Irony, as it's commonly defined, is an often-misunderstood topic and many people who are familiar with it are annoyed with the misapplication of the term. Here is a guide to understanding irony that may help.

• Irony describes a result that is the opposite of what would commonly be expected under the circumstances.
• From that definition, you can see that there must be a common expectation in the first place. If an event happens that is merely coincidental or unrelated to the circumstances, it is "unlikely" or maybe "unfortunate" but not ironic. Even if something is coincidental in a regrettable, cynical, extreme, or unusual way, that does not make it ironic.
  • Example 1: Rain on your wedding day -- regrettable, but your wedding day has nothing to do with the weather. Not ironic.
  • Example 2: Running off with the best man on your wedding day. Ironic.
• If an event is appropriate given the circumstances, it is "fitting" or "apropos," not ironic. Even if something is fitting in a clever or unusual way, it cannot be ironic. In fact, apropos and ironic are more or less antonyms.
  • Example 1: A traffic jam when you're already late -- something that just makes a bad situation worse is appropriate to the circumstance. Not ironic.
  • Example 2: A traffic jam on a newly-opened expressway. Ironic.

So technically, I must say that no, the event you mentioned is not ironic but is better described as...
[ ] extremely unfortunate
[ ] weirdly coincidental
[X] amusingly apropos
[ ] oddly fitting
[ ] poetic justice
and I hope you find this post useful.

Re:How To Satisfy The Irony Police

[Bertie]

Actually, if you check the latest issue of the Oxford English Dictionary, you'll find the definition of irony is:

"David Blunkett losing his job as a result of intrusions into his private life"

See also: "Proof that God has a sense of humour"

Re:How To Satisfy The Irony Police

[ajs]

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.

End vs. means

[tepples]

Guest wrote:
No, you take the arctangent of each sample to simulate soft clipping. They are not the same.

Soft clipping is a generic word for an end result. Using an arctangent waveshape on a waveform is a means to this end; it will "get" you soft clipping, though it's only a rough "simulation" of what a valve amp or tape deck does. Simulating a particular flavor of soft clipping takes a lot more computing power, but if you just want to avoid harshly clipping your audio's peaks, arctangent is a nice-sounding way to do it.

Digital: it's about efficiency

[flinxmeister]

...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.

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.

I just got my quadraphonic set up!

[Colonel Blimp]

Oh well, back to 8 track.

This is actually true.

[Animats]

The engineer who did that was Bob Carver of Phase Linear. He characterized the highest rated tube amps and built a transistor amp with the same transfer function. In blind A/B/X tests, "high end" listeners couldn't tell the difference.

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.

Clarification on BASF and AGFA

[Sir Ancestor]

I am not sure about Emtec but BASF is not former AGFA!!! Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) is German chemical and plastics manufacturing company originally founded in 1865. Agfagevaert Gruppe, Dutch Agfa-gevaert Groep, is German and Belgian corporate group established in 1964 in the merger of Agfa AG of Leverkusen, W.Ger., and Gevaert Photo-Producten NV of Mortsel, Belg. The merger established twin operating companies, one German (Agfa-Gevaert AG) and one Belgian (Gevaert-Agfa NV, which in 1971 became Agfa-Gevaert NV). Controlling interest in the group was purchased by Bayer AG in 1981.

Analog vs. digital?

[mrjb]

I used to use quantegy (quantigy? formerly Ampex) tapes in my ADAT machine, a digital 8-track recorder that records 42 minutes of 8 channel, 48 khz digital audio on what is basically an analog VHS tape. Of coure, ADAT tapes aren't the same as reel-to-reel tapes- the packaging is different. I suspect that division will still be running for quite a while, as digital ADAT tapes tend to have better compatibility across machines than analog reel-to-reel. Still I have a hard time believing that not a single studio is going to record anything (analog) on (analog) tape anymore. Not because I don't think harddisk recording hasn't caught up with analog technology, but because the natural compression of tape gives quite a pleasant harmonic distortion to the sound recorded on it. Also, harddisks crash and burned media gets unreadable. For longer-term audio storage, tape is still the medium of choice. Given this, what's the alternative to reel-to-reel tape?

There is an easy answer

[hairyfeet]

I've recorded in digital and "old school" tape studios.And they both kicked ass.How?The smart digital studio guys run the old tube preamps and eq's.That way you get that nice analog warmth going in,and the ease of digital editing afterwards.It's the best of both worlds.Now let us pray that those few plants making tubes don't go out of business,or all us musicians are REALLY screwed.

struder?

[RMH101]

is that the apple-struder model with the dolby cinnamon sprinkles?
Studer!