The end of audiotape?

[Jim Alfredson]

Regarding the move to isolation and over-dubbing, many engineers (including one RVG) blame this on the musicians and producers. I don't think engineers are totally to blame.

It definitely makes the process easier. Does it make it better? For some types of music, probably. For others, probably not.

I ain't scared of no bleed!

[AllenLowe]

you're absolutely right - everybody wants to be able to fix everything today, to overdub -

[mikeweil]

Remember direct-to-disc recording was invented in the 1970's to avoid the narrow dynamics of analog tape? Listening habits die hard. And fool us all the time - that's why compression works so well with pop music listeners.

Are you saying jazz recordings don't use compression?

Of course not, in fact the narrow dynamic range of analog tape is some kind of compression, too.

Like Allan Lowe i think it depends most on the people who use the equipment - I have both analog and digital recordings that sound like crap, and others that are beautiful. But it is not the medium per se. I keep saying we underestimate the effect of our listening habits.

[mikeweil]

Regarding the move to isolation and over-dubbing, many engineers (including one RVG) blame this on the musicians and producers. I don't think engineers are totally to blame.

It definitely makes the process easier. Does it make it better? For some types of music, probably. For others, probably not.

I ain't scared of no bleed!

I think some RVG recordings start sounding strange when Rudy opens and closes mikes to control the bleed ...

Re the blame is on the musicians, too:

Jim Anderson said something in that direction in "his" thread in the Audio forum, that drummers and all used to concentrate more knowing they would have to do the whole track all over again when they made a mistake. He noticed a lessening concentration and feeling knowing you can replace a part or passage, which depends on isolation to be done.

I noticed many listeners are so used to the artificial ambience present on most recordings, they find a recording with a more natural sound to be amateurish. Too bad.

I also agree that many instruments sound best when recorded at a cerrtain distance, but when recording via overdub you get a lot of problems when you do it that way. The room makes the sound, and a virtual room ain't no room at all, in a certain respect. I will be involved in a lot of recording with overdubs, part by part, in the next three months - I hate to do this, but we will make the best of it, as this is a very important record for our band.

[AllenLowe]

overdubbing is a problem - in the few instances where I wanted to do something about a bad or sloppy passage, what I did was re-record the section at the right tempo and edit it in - this can be tricky, but ok if done right -

[Chuck Nessa]

It is very dangerous to get dogmatic about "legit" techniques - circumstances can easily alter "values'.

[Jim Alfredson]

I agree. If it sounds good, it is good. Our last record was recorded with headphones, with everybody in the same room as the drums, but all instrument speakers (the Leslie of my organ, Joe's guitar amps) in separate rooms. It worked out fine and sounds good.

Our next trio CD will be recorded in my basement, with everyone in the same room together, instruments and all, because that's all I can do. I don't have multiple isolated rooms. And so far it sounds good, too.

[AllenLowe]

I may be dogmatic on this - but if it sounded good with the speakers in different rooms, and if it sounds good in isolation, than it will sound BETTER when everything is together and recorded "live" - ever wonder, for example, why the best jazz recordings (and this ain't just deluded nostalgia) happened in the 1950s and 1960s? Well, that's how they were recorded, "live" and together. Think about it. I feel strongly about this and don't mean to piss anybody off -

[JSngry]

I'll ask again - could videotape manufacturers now make audiotape? How big of a tweak would it be?

[Soul Stream]

I don't think we're in danger of running out of WORLDWIDE tape manufacturers. But, just like tubes, they will be manufactured in Russia, China, ect. I don't have any real knowledge of this based on facts. Just a hunch. It's going to make more than just America to kill audio tape. (Thank god tubes are still being pumped out. Seems like they had a purpose beyond the initial one too. Just like audio tape does I believe.)

[Brandon Burke]

Story on Morning Edition this morning about "the death of audiotape". Kind of a puff piece but whatever....

Click here and scroll down to "A Fond Farewell to Audio Tape".

Edited January 10, 2005 by Brandon Burke

[Guest ariceffron]

THERE IS A GIANT AMPEX SIGN IN SAN JOSE OFF THE 101 BUT WHEN I WENT 2 FIND IT I CONCLUDED THAT THE SIGN IS THERE BUT NO AMPEX CORPORATION

[Brandon Burke]

THERE IS A GIANT AMPEX SIGN IN SAN JOSE OFF THE 101 BUT WHEN I WENT 2 FIND IT I CONCLUDED THAT THE SIGN IS THERE BUT NO AMPEX CORPORATION

Oh shit! You live less than an hour away from where I work?

[Guest ariceffron]

NO I DONT LIVE THERE. WHY WOULD I EVER WANT TO LIVE IN SAN JOSE?!?! OR THE BAY AREA OF THAT MATTER. TOO BIG AND DIRTY

[vibes]

From today's Wall Street Journal:

Tale of the Tape:

Audiophiles Bemoan

The End of the Reel

As Quantegy Shuts Plant,

Purists Snap Up Supply;

NASA Feels the Crunch

By ETHAN SMITH and SARAH MCBRIDE

Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

January 12, 2005; Page A1

Jeff Tweedy, leader of the rock group Wilco, prefers to record music on reel-to-reel tape rather than on the digital equipment that has overtaken the music industry. Purists like him think it confers a warmth and richness to recordings that a computer cannot.

But last Friday, Mr. Tweedy hit a snag as he prepared for a session in Wilco's Chicago studio space: Nobody could find any of the professional-grade audio tape the band is accustomed to using. "I was under the impression that there was a shortage of tape in Chicago," Mr. Tweedy says.

What he didn't yet realize was that the shortage is global. Quantegy Inc., which may be the last company in the world still manufacturing the high-quality tape, abruptly shut down its Opelika, Ala., plant on Dec. 31, leaving audiophiles in the lurch.

Quantegy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday and hopes a restructuring will eventually revive its operations. But its future is uncertain, inasmuch as demand also is dwindling for its videotape.

The news has set off a frantic scramble in the music industry as producers and studios seek to secure as much Quantegy tape as possible. By the middle of last week, most suppliers around the country had sold out their entire stocks of reel-to-reel audio tape.

[Jeff Tweedy]

The supply that remained came at prices rapidly escalating above the usual $140-per-reel wholesale price of Quantegy 2-inch tape. Walter Sear, a prominent New York studio owner, quickly snapped up 60 or 70 reels, some at prices that had ballooned by as much as 40%. "We'll have to change our approach to life without tape," Mr. Sear says.

Quantegy is hearing from customers all over the world trying to secure the professional-grade tape. A Japanese musician e-mailed from Tokyo, eager to get more for a recording session. Richard Lindenmuth, Quantegy's president and chief executive, says he'll try to help. Some customers are trying to organize their own bailouts of his company. Andrew Kautz, president of the Society of Professional Audio Recording Services, called Mr. Lindenmuth Friday hoping to get a one-time special order, a request Mr. Lindenmuth is considering.

The crunch reaches far beyond the recording industry. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration uses Quantegy tape on its space shuttles to record information ranging from pressure to temperature. This week NASA has been trying to buy 20 reels from Quantegy.

Even Hollywood is affected. Some die-hard moviemakers believe voices sound better recorded on analog tape. In making "Spider-Man 2" and the Harry Potter movies, digital recording technology has taken the front seat, but backups of dialogue were recorded on reels of Quantegy tape. Engineers are also worried about how long digital recordings will last.

Tape was used to record most music after World War II. In the heyday of tape recording, it was common for rock bands with big recording budgets to run through hundreds of reels of tape in making just one album.

But over the past decade, the tape has been rapidly outmoded by cheaper, more convenient computer-based digital recording. People in the music industry say that as few as 5% of albums are recorded and mixed using audio tape.

The purists have a romantic attachment to the taping process. "It's a much more musical medium than digital could ever dream of being," says Joe Gastwirt, a mastering engineer who has worked with the Grateful Dead and others. "It actually does something to the music."

Most of the industry gravitated to the cheaper digital technique, however, transforming tape from a commodity to a boutique item. That changeover has wiped out a once-hardy field of competitors. Quantegy was founded shortly after World War II by John Herbert Orr, a former Army major who called the company Orradio Industries. Ampex Corp., a maker of recording equipment, bought Orradio in 1959 and renamed it Ampex Magnetic Tape.

Over the years, Quantegy went head-to-head with various competitors, including European brands like Emtec Magnetics and BASF. But as the market began to fall off, Ampex decided to get out of the tape business in 1995, and spun off Quantegy that year. As computer technology overtook the recording industry in the late 1990s, Quantegy's competitors bailed out. Some tapes are manufactured in China, but audio professionals generally don't consider them to be of consistently high quality.

Quantegy's audiotape business in 2004 was still profitable, accounting for $6 million of the company's $30 million in sales. But the company fell into trouble because of other obligations and when Quantegy lost one of its major videotape customers in July, it suffered a cash crunch. By year's end, it couldn't meet payroll and sent its employees home. Mr. Lindenmuth believes an injection of $10 million would save the company, and is hoping a Chapter 11 reorganization will give him time to find investors.

When Wilco's Mr. Tweedy found himself in a bind, he telephoned Steve Albini, a Chicago producer and studio owner who is known for his work with Nirvana and the Pixies. Mr. Albini's Electrical Audio Recording is one of the last major studios in the country to rely exclusively on audiotape.

Mr. Albini had been stockpiling tape for more than a year, worried that the end of manufacturing was near. But when Quantegy closed its doors, he redoubled his efforts to secure as much as possible. Working through normal sources, he tracked down around 65 reels, enough to make about 10 albums.

He also began "looking in the weeds," as he puts it. He tracked down contacts who buy odd lots of electronic equipment on the salvage market. Through one, Mr. Albini hit the mother lode: nearly 2,000 reels of 2-inch magnetic tape, enough to fill a small warehouse. Mr. Albini bought 100 reels and is trying to keep the supplier's name and whereabouts to himself. He says he doesn't want to see a better-funded competitor move in on the remaining stock.

Mr. Albini estimates he now has a year's worth of tape, or about 500 reels, on hand. So when Mr. Tweedy called last Friday, Mr. Albini volunteered two reels of tape -- as "a professional courtesy." But, he says, "I don't want to go into business supplying tape to people."

Looking ahead to a tape-starved future, Mr. Tweedy has a fallback: The band has an archive of around 100 reels of tape it has used in recording its various albums. By splicing out and saving the final version of each song, he figures they can maintain the archive and also generate a supply of tapes that can be recycled for future recording sessions.

Still, Mr. Tweedy jokes, if the tape scarcity continues, even some of the archived recordings might become expendable. "I'm just fearful that all the master tapes at the loft would be worth more if they were blank," he says.

[neveronfriday]

To me this arguement is like digital pianos vs. real pianos.  In theory, digital pianos should sound great!  You don't have to tune them, or worry about regulation (the action is always the same), they use samples from the best pianos in the world, meticulously recorded, etc. etc.  But we all know compared to the real thing they sound like crap.

Hm.

Although I usually always take the side of acoustic instruments when this kind of topic comes up (and I will as well in the future), recent developments in technology could possibly shake that kind of belief that digital can't hold a candle to analogue.

Example (and I will try to dig it up in the basement):

About two years ago a sound engineer friend of mine from Scandinavia sent me a copy of an article from some pro magazine which told the story of a test that (I think) Yamaha ran with three world-famous pianists. You know, the ones that always say that they can hear within a second if, say, a Bösendorfer is used or some "cheapo" digital solution. This test was supervised by some engineers to make sure the company presenting it's latest sampler (or whatever it was) didn't beef it up with a megaton of sound processors, effects, etc. Simple setup: master keyboard with sampler; known pianist playing.

All three of the test persons were unable, in a live setting, to tell digital and acoustic apart. None. Two of them actually went for the digital one.

I know that these tests are usually dumb, but they do show that these blanket statements that digital is "crap" are simply too strong.

Hell, I've played drums for a long time and use a digital set (two Roland modules chained together) and if you know what you are doing, you can tweak them enough to get damn close. Not close enough yet (sample time is simply too short for cymbals, toms tend to "machine-gun" a bit, despite Roland's new interval control technology), but one or two more generations further down the road (that's about 12 to 15 years Roland time ... they milk their models to the max until their "users" are about to stage a riot) and we will have (I'm absolutely sure) the first drum set which copies (I use that term on purpose) acoustic drums.

Sure, you can ask why anyone would want to copy something that comes with a price tag way below the machine copying it, but it sure does come in handy (studio, practice; live settings in which time is of the essence).

Until the fuse blows.

Then you're screwed.

Technology has come a hell of a long way. I, for one, did not think it was possible, but I did change my mind recently. We're damn close.

End of rant.

Edited January 12, 2005 by deus62

[Jim Alfredson]

I don't take blindfold tests very seriously. There are far too many variables involved. Somebody on another board was trying to convince me that there is no audible difference between 16bit and 24bit and cited some blindfold test as an example. He said the music was "orchestral" music, but when pushed further revealed that it was orchestral music using sample libraries. Obviously, recording real classical music in a real acoustic space like a hall is going to show off the qualities of 24bit (bigger dynamic range, better resolution for reverb tails, etc.) than a sampled, synthesized "orchestra", no matter how good the samples are.

For the piano blindfold, what sort of music was it? Playing a fast Beethoven piece with lots of runs and pouding of the keys is different than playing a slower piece with lots of sustain where strings are interacting with other strings causing sympathetic vibrations and such.

[Ron S]

I don't take blindfold tests very seriously.  There are far too many variables involved.  Somebody on another board was trying to convince me that there is no audible difference between 16bit and 24bit and cited some blindfold test as an example.  He said the music was "orchestral" music, but when pushed further revealed that it was orchestral music using sample libraries.  Obviously, recording real classical music in a real acoustic space like a hall is going to show off the qualities of 24bit (bigger dynamic range, better resolution for reverb tails, etc.) than a sampled, synthesized "orchestra", no matter how good the samples are.

For the piano blindfold, what sort of music was it?  Playing a fast Beethoven piece with lots of runs and pouding of the keys is different than playing a slower piece with lots of sustain where strings are interacting with other strings causing sympathetic vibrations and such.

So, you mean, like, all that "scientific method" junk we learned in high school chemistry is actually something we can use in our, like, REAL LIVES? Now, what about all that trigonometry crap???

Edited January 12, 2005 by Ron S

[Adam]

Got this from another email list:

----------

> I am an editor and publisher of books on the

> cultural history of film

> and media technology here in Germany and I was

> tracking the folding of

> BASF/EMTEC and Quategy quite a bit, not only for the

> reason that we

> have a book about the "history of magnetic tape" in

> the making.

>

> Today I received good news that fresh magnetic tape

> will be coming soon

> from new European sources. What I understand from my

> sources is that

> coating and production of 1/4 inch tape according to

> German studio tape

> quality standards has started this week, further

> that test and research

> is currently ongoing to expand this program in order

> to launch also

> audio tape manufacturing in 1 and 2 inch gauges for

> multitrack analogue

> audio recording (as a direct reaction to Quantegy

> filing chapter 11).

> Sources say that the production and marketing of

> magnetic audio tape

> for studios and mastering was and and could/will be

> profitable and that

> EMTEC and Quantegy folded due to other reasons. It's

> all a question

> about downsizing and marketing into niche markets. A

> public press

> notice on this topic naming manufacturing company

> and people involved

> should be expected within 2 - 3 weeks, sources say.

>

> hope this brings new hope,

> Joachim Polzer

> www.polzer.org

>

[Brandon Burke]

That's fine and all, but I'd be willing to bet that a quarter (or even a third) of Quantegy's clientele were scared far enough away from analog by the debacle to finally say "you know what, the hell with it" and simply went digital right then and there.

Either way, this is good news. And don't rule out US producers as well. I talked to some people in the Bay Area yesterday who are crunching numbers as we speak to get an operation going out here. So.....

[Chuck Nessa]

When did Maxell and others stop producing 2 inch tape?