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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."
Sigs cause cancer.
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.
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
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
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...
The article says they're just closed for restructuring. This is vague, but it may not mean they are closed down permanently.
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.
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.
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
Great. Now I guess i finally have to upgrade to an 8-track.
To those of you who are saying "BFD, nobody uses analog tape anymore", have a good look at the liner notes of one of your audio CDs (and don't you dare say "BFD, nobody uses audio CDs anymore."
Somewhere in those notes, there'll be a logo that says either AAD, ADD, or DDD. If your CD is either one of the first two, then the original instruments were recorded to 2" tape. If it's the second, then the 2" tape was mastered to 1/2" tape.
A LOT of professional recording studios still use this technology. For one thing, if you send too much signal into an analog tape, you get a nice sounding tape compression, whereas if you send too much signal into a ADC, you get really horrible sounding digital clipping.
\/me wonders what several hundred recording studios in L.A. are gonna do now.
Causation can cause correlation
The magic word is "restructuring".
Quantegy bought the reel tape business from AMPEX... and they're apparently failing as a company.
This will probably resolve itself as:
A) Quantegy gets its act together and the plant reopens, or
B) Quantegy goes under, plant is sold and it reopens.
As others have pointed out, there's still a significant pro market, and many audiophile types, so there's enough market for the right supplier.
Digital is better.
In every respect.
I am an audiophile, and If you are to play vinyl through headphones to someone in the next room they will not be able to tell the difference between the original source and a digital recording of the vinyl playback. A digital recording can have a superset of all measurable audio components - spectrum and amplitude.
And as for the aliasing of digital recordings, when the sound hits the air it IS analog it becomes analog. When you use very high quality digital audio recordings you can capture and reproduce sounds that begin to (and for all intents do) border on the limits of they physics of sound itself.
Digital is superior in every way to analog. it is a myth that a person can hear the difference in a sufficciently high sample-rate recording.
Imagine an analog recording like a wooden box. You can hold it and carry it around. eventually it will begin to wear and tear.
Digital is like the knowledge of how to build that box. everytime you want to use the box you can build it from scratch instantaneously and you have a perfect, brand new box.
Sure, it's made out of wood from a different tree than your last box - but it is in better shape and the wood which you construct it out is of the same type and is stronger since it is unworn.
Furthermore, with the eventual advent of exponentially more sophisticated computation we will see the ability to record sound and reproduce it in such a way that it could be called seamless.
This will be accomplished not by a direct imprint on some meduim, but via an informational representation (analogous to digital) which will so dwarf the capabilities of the ancient idea of analog recordings that those who said analog is superior will be gaffawed in a similar fashion as we laugh at the gentleman below for his statements.
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
- Marshal Ferdinand Foch [Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre] (circa 1911)
He was Supreme Commander of Allied forces, 1918
He held a similar attachment to the classical way of doing things and saw inherent superiority in his beliefs.
He was wrong for reasons blatently obvious from the perspective of the modern day.
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.
The best jokes are always the subtle ones.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
You don't have to agree, you're just totally wrong.
Analog storage is limited by the speed of the recording medium and the amount of surface area utilized to store the analog soundwaves (in whatever fashion).
Even professional recording gear resolves far less sound information than what digital audio gear can do... Sure, a standard CD is a pretty paltry 44khz/16bit. So crank it up to professional units... 96khz or higher, go to 24bit recording... Still not enough? Go even higher if you want, but you'd be deluding yourself if you think you'll hear the difference.
The sound quality that people tend to like in analog gear is a result of the imprecision of the devices. Signals tend to leak, get transformed and modified by the analog gear they pass through, and also as it relates to the environment the gear is in (RF interference, atmospherics, etc). Some would argue that it gives them a "wamer, richer tone", but it all boils down to analog devices not maintaining an exact representation of the sound they are conveying.
So yes, you probably can tell the difference, but what you're hearing isn't a result of the storage medium, but of interm processing and modification through imprecise devices.
If you were to take the same output of the analog tape deck and record it into a high-quality digital deck (at the aforementioned 96/24), then play both of those back, you'd never be able to tell the difference.
So, if you want to argue that you prefer sound processed through analog gear, that's just fine. To call digital "lower quality" is foolish.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
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."
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.
...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, 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?
Oh God, an audiophile flamewar. Slashdot editors, delete this thread, now! Oh no...it's too late! I'm melting....I'm melting....
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
- 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.
...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.
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
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.