Analog loyalists are in a funk. Quantegy Inc. have shut down their manufacturing plant leaving audio engineers scrambling to hoard as much tape as they can.

Quantegy Inc., is more than likely the last company in the world that still manufactures high quality reel-to-reel magnetic tape. NASA even uses the tape on its space shuttles to record information ranging from pressure to temperature.

Reel-to-reel recording has been outmoded over the years by digital recording. "People in the music industry say that as few as 5% of albums are recorded and mixed using audio tape."

If anyone's in need, though, apparently Steve Albini has the hookup. Jeff Tweedy found himself in a bind and phoned Herr Albini. Albini's Electrical Audio Recording is one of the last major studios in the country that soley uses magnetic tape recording. He heard that Quantegy was closing its plant and began securing through normal means around "65 reels, enough to make ten albums." He also started looking through unconvevtional means and ended up scoring almost 2,000 reels of 2-inch magentic tape. He bought 100 reels and is keeping hush-hush about who the supplier is. He doesn't want some big-wig competitor hoarding in on the remaining supply.

Now, Stevie has 500 reels of tape and he volunteered two reels of tape as "a professional courtesy" to the Wilco chaps. But, he says, "I don't want to go into business supplying tape to people."

Quotes and sources from the Wall Street Journal

Interesting and kind of sad. Interesting to note that the recording process is moving to all digital and sad to note the same.

I was in a band in college, and we recorded two records. We recorded on to 2 inch reel to reel in the session studio and then went digital to do mixing and post-effects. It's interesting to note that whiel we ended up buying only to plate (to make extra cds) we did not buy the reel to reel tape. Our mixign engineer actually preferred to use the old tape over and over again. He said that as the tape gets used more, the magnetic portions actually even out (due to the constant flexing and unflexing of the strip due to the magnetic pull, etc.) and the sound gets smoother.

So, he found that he used the older tapes to get a cleaner sound - something which at the time seemed completely backwards. Granted, there is a point of diminishin returns, where the tape actually starts to degrade and pull apart. Artists obviously won't want to reuse these old reel to reel tapes (for posterity reasons - and so they can make new masters of the records in the future if they want).

Anyway, interesting post. Thanks for sharing.

I've heard of using the tape like that until it breaks up.

There are a lot of people in the music world who are dismayed at the rise of Pro Tools and digital studios.

The same doesn't hold up for video, which eventually just turns the picture into muck.

I think that using the analog tape is somewhat similar to the tube amp issue. The digital protools ensure that what you record today will sound just as good tomorrow and that the source will not introduce any artifacts. I've heard that tube amps introduce some even ordered distortion that people really dig. Probably the same idea - the distortion in the sound signal might help to make the tracks sound, I don't know, less digital, more organic, etc. I know that Tweedy is a real nut about doign things the "right" way 0-using tried and true methods. DEspite his tendancies and willingness to experiment musically and sonically, it seems that he's really a traditionalist at heart. I love that Wilco stuff - you also can't get my brother to stop gushing about it.

In reply to:

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Granted, there is a point of diminishing returns, where the tape actually starts to...pull apart

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The failure mode isn't the tape pulling apart, but each pass over the heads scrapes a tiny amount of oxide off the tape.

What happens is you slowly, gradually, lose the high frequencies as the oxide wears away.

This exact situation nearly doomed the famous Fleetwood Mac Rumours album. The album production was so long, and involved so many dubbing passes that over the course of a year, ever so gradually the highs were lost.

They only noticed it by accident when playing a "safety" copy made months before. The highs on that tape were clear and crisp. This jeopardized six months of work.

The high frequency loss affected primarily specific tracks, e.g, cymbals. They recovered by taking the old safety copies with good high freq. tracks, and merging those with recent vocal tracks. This had to be done via a manual tape-to-tape sync, constantly adjusting tape speed by hand. It's a miracle it worked at all.

Needless to say many musicians with such experiences are happy with digital.