Last Manufacturer of Pro Analog Audio Tape Closes 550
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."
Re:Irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:250 people lost their jobs? (Score:-1, Insightful)
Where 2" reel-to-reel is used (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
It's not the end, yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Yikes (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps what they need is a mixing board with Volumes that go to 11
Re:Damn (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Damn (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yikes (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Damn (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Irony (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as I know, it's pretty much impossible to get mag tape wider than 2" these days.
The other thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:I still use analogue tape1 (Medium...Message) (Score:1, Insightful)
Analog tape is not just a mediom for recording/archiving/storing music. It is a medium used to create it. That is, musicians use the characteristics of the medium - they manipulate it's unique qualities as a medium - to create sounds. These are not necessarily equivalent with different media (like digital media) - doesn't sound the same, isn't as easy to work. It's as if all the manufacturers of watercolors and oil paints went out of business 'cause we've just gotten acrylics to work right. Or if the makers of hand-held woodworking tools shut down because we're all going to use computer-controlled 3D modeling lathes from now on.
It ain't the same and it impoverishes the options - signficantly down-sizes the available tool kit. Things that were once easy will become harder, or more expensive, or maybe impossible.
Digital: it's about efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Damn (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:the old story of the tube and transistor (Score:1, Insightful)
This is a fundamental misconception. You need to learn about reconstruction filters. They're an essential part of any digital audio system based on Shannon's sampling theory, and they eliminate the 'rough edges' in the output waveform (among other things).
"But there's still information in the analog recording that gets eliminated in sampling."
Only if you use insufficient sampling rate and/or sample width. If you choose those parameters to capture as much bandwidth (sample rate) and SNR (sample width) as is needed to exceed the bandwidth and SNR of the analog source, you can record literally all the information in the original signal.
You don't have to take my word for it. Claude Shannon proved it about a half century ago. And when I say 'prove' I don't mean he made a bunch of measurements, he actually proved it in a mathematical sense.
In the case of audio, the portion of the audio band audible to humans is rather narrow in bandwidth, so making essentially perfect digital recordings of audio is not too hard technologically.
Re:OT: Recursion Joke in Data Structures Text (Score:2, Insightful)