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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."
"The cyber" is a word again, tape decks are back... what's next, twiddler keyboards and phreaking?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Also holistic embrace of artisan communicable diseases that have been cured for decades in preparation for the return to rustic, wholesome, and natural levels of infant and maternal mortality.
Do many of them have analog components to them...ie tube amps, pre-amps, tape....etc?
Wouldn't it really only sound the best on analog home play, if the source was also at least mostly recorded using analog technology?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If people want the "experience" of rewinding tapes, taking five minutes to change to a different album, etc. then nobody here should try to stop them.
All we need is a law to prevent them bragging about the "experience" in public places.
No sig today...
are doomed to hear it all over again. 50 years ago, vinyl (45 dB S/N at best) and 15ips tape (65 dB S/N at best, before DNR) were as good as it got. Since the early 80s, there's been CDs (100 dB S/N). That's already nearly 40 years. Going back is not something any person with normal hearing could ever consider. So when you see these things being labelled anything but noisy old gear, consider the source's hearing. No, not everyone hears normally, just like not everyone sees normally.
Let that be a lesson. Hear it.
However, no hipster has $11,000 to spend
Most people couldn't afford reel-to-reel machines back in the day (when it actually was the superior format), hence the nostalgia for shitty ass vinyl. Today, even if it was less expensive, it's likely the hipsters wouldn't want it because reel-to-reel doesn't have that "warm" (which is really just the RIAA EQ curve and any other adjustments done to the sound to make it cuttable) sound they associate with "analog". If you wanted your music to sound true to the source, you'd just be using lossless digital formats anyway.
In other words, people buy vinyl copies of modern albums because they want the shitty music to sound shittier. There's no helping those people.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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.
I for one can't wait until unpowered cylinder phonographs come back. I even bought a gold-plated horn to ensure optimal audio fidelity.
I realize lots of people are skeptical of tape, but things like balanced ins / outs and control voltage (pre-midi, Moog and analog equipment uses it still) was not even twinkle in someone's eyes on cassette tape decks when the digital age started.
In short for this example, digital delay doesn't sound as good. It sounds too perfect. Binson tape delays were used by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin a lot but cassette decks opens new possibilities. CV can actually control wow and flutter for cool effects. This space case TE-1 deck with all the bells and whistles is around $1000.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc...
Heh. Old-fart story time. In Italy, hotels (and hostels) used to restrict calls by physically locking the rotary dial with a small lock, and charging for the key. So we got good at pulse-dialing by tapping the hangup key.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Who the hell is buying all this retro stuff? I love the tactile nature of physical media but you know what I love even more? Space! My collection has gone digital and I have a streaming account. That is an entire wall I have reclaimed. Millennials can't even afford houses so where do they plan to keep record players and tape decks?
I wonder how difficult it would be to manufacture tape heads again? It wasn't trivial engineering to get the performance we got out of these things before they became obsolete.
There are people who still make them, largely as aftermarket support for studio recorders. JRF Magnetics for one, and I think there's a place in Japan though I forget the name. Besides, cassette decks are still in limited production, and mag stripe readers use similar technology, so it's not like it's entirely lost.
I'm bypassing all you techno-dweebs by converting all my music back to wax cylinders, the way god and Edison intended.
You haven't heard anything until you've experienced Lady GaGa's "Born This Way" in the original 15rpm 5 kilohertz mono version.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
All I can see is the money from selling old reel to reel decks to hipsters with more money then what they can do with.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.