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Surging Demand For Vinyl LPs Has Raised Hopes For Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck, Which is Returning To Sale For First Time in Decades (bloomberg.com)
It's no secret
that sales of vinyl music are at the highest in decades. Even the lowly cassette tape is regaining popularity as some millennials embrace analog music over digital downloads and streaming services. But for the first time in more than two decades, a German company is reviving what may be the ultimate format: a new reel-to-reel tape machine. From a report: Dusseldorf-based Roland Schneider Precision Engineering this week will introduce four Ballfinger reel-to-reel machines, bringing back a technology that dominated professional music recording for most of the 20th century and is now making a comeback with audiophiles and artists including Lady Gaga. The sleek machines, some of them customizable, will retail from about 9,500 euros ($11,400) for the basic version to about 24,000 euros for the high-end model, which features three direct-drive motors, an editing system and walnut side panels. "Digital media is great, but experiencing music is more than just listening to a sound file -- it's sensual, it's reels that turn and can be touched," says Roland Schneider, the machine's designer. "When it comes to audio quality, nothing else in the analog world gets you closer to the experience of being right there in the recording studio than reel-to-reel tape."
Recording on 2-inch analog 24-track is different than digital. Tape exhibits saturation effects -- if I record a drum track onto tape, I can record it "hot" by turning up the gain so that the hardest hits saturate the tape. The result is a distinctive compression/limiting/harmonic effect. One of the reasons that people complained about sterile and thin digital sound when we shifted from analog to digital was that digital recorders don't behave the same way. That said, there are now some excellent digital plug-ins that emulate this effect.
That said, it makes sense to mix your 24-track analog recording to digital since the digital reproduction will be technically better than a dub of an analog 2-track tape.
The real "magic" tape decks of the 50's - 90's were the ones that ran two-inch tape at 15 inches / second. And that was super expensive. I think $200 for ten minutes is the last I heard, and I think that was for Squirrel Nut Zipper's "Hot"
These new tape decks are 1/4 inch, which are really not made for studio recording, no matter what their looks try to portray.
The topic is too complex to be easily addressed in any kind of civilized manner, but I think the digital / analog debate can be summarized as such: Early digital capture, 44khz PCM is crap. Yet 44khz PCM playback is OK. Well-mastered, analog-born sound played back on CD sounds wonderful.
The real breakthrough was DSD. Capture it in DSD and the playback will sound as warm and rich as any two-inch Ampex machine from the past, especially if equal care is put into the mikes, the miking, etc.
Too complex to easily address here. It *will* de-evolve into flames, namecalling and tiny closed minds.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Are there many(any) studios that record primarily, in analog?
Yes, there are.
Do many of them have analog components to them...ie tube amps, pre-amps, tape....etc?
All preamps are analog preamps. Almost all microphones are analog microphones. Most major studios have some analog hardware and utilize it.
Wouldn't it really only sound the best on analog home play, if the source was also at least mostly recorded using analog technology?
Most new vinyl is recorded at least in some part on a digital medium. It does not mean that the vinyl is less "analog", but the days of AAA (Analog recording, Analog mixing, and Analog mastering) are long gone (even Jack White "cheats" now), but that doesn't make it bad. Most professionals in the audio industry use the right tool for the job, be it analog, digital, or a hybrid solution.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Yeah, keep banging your head against the wall with that argument. Analog devices dither the original signal with spectrally shaped noise to the point that information is lost at a much earlier point and to a greater extent than with digital signals. In fact, quantization noise in digital is rarely the actual noise floor since analog noise in the recording with have dithered the signal long before it kicks in. The typical microphone having a 60db S/N at best, and the rooms audio is recorded in have noise floors around 25dB should be enough to convince anyone, but you keep living in those high frequency cloud castles of yours.
No. Quantization noise is the noise introduced by quantization, not compression. Quantization means turning a continuous signal into a discrete signal (16 bit can only distinguish 2^16=65536 amplitudes.) Instead of reproducing the exact amplitude, a digital signal can only reproduce an almost exact amplitude. The difference is noise. This noise is the reason why CDs don't have an infinite signal to noise ratio. Analog audio could in theory have much higher signal to noise ratios, but in reality the SNR of analog audio is much worse for reasons that are practically impossible to avoid. Audio CDs are capable of recording the same signal with less than a thousandth of the noise level that a good analog audio reproduction would have.
1) Tape stopped using acetate in the 1950s. Modern tape materials have their problems too, but most are better structurally and for archive purposes than acetate. OTOH, acetate breaks much more cleanly so if you are into a little splicing...
2) Yes, tape loses quality over time. Much of that can be restored or even (to a small degree) improved with modern digital processing, but there comes a time where the original material is no longer usable (that happened to the early London stereo recordings of Wagner's Ring) and you're forced to work with the best of the available digital transfers.
3) You might recall that early digital recordings were also on tape; direct digital recording to memory or disk and archiving on disk (optical or magnetic) wasn't really part of standard practice until at least the late 1980s if not 1990s. DAT machines were never a consumer thing, but were big in the commercial realm. One problem with digital tapes is that the recorded signal degrades faster than analog. So you might still be able to play (carefully) and restore an analog tape master from the 1950s if it's in reasonable physical condition, but a digital tape from the 1980s is very likely to be unusable even if perfectly preserved physically.
For archiving analog sources, it's most important to preserve the physical condition, so it can be played and the signal then processed to remove any degradation; if properly recorded, the signal degrades quite slowly. Digital, on any media but especially magnetic, requires periodic re-writing to new media. Even well into the digital era, may studies would print analog tapes for archiving because they were more robust than digital.