Music industry in a spin as reel-to-reel runs out
January 13, 2005
BY ETHAN SMITH AND SARAH MCBRIDE
Jeff Tweedy, leader of the band Wilco, prefers to record his music on reel-to-reel tape rather than on the digital equipment that has overtaken the music industry. The Chicago rocker and other purists think it confers a warmth and richness to recordings that a computer cannot.
But last Friday 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,'' Tweedy says.
What he didn't realize was that the shortage is global. Quantegy Inc., which may be the last company in the world manufacturing the high-quality tape, 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 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 stocks of reel-to-reel audio tape. Prices jumped above the usual $140-per-reel wholesale price of Quantegy 2-inch tape.
NASA in a bind, too
''We'll have to change our approach to life without tape,'' says Walter Sear, a prominent New York studio owner who snapped up 60 or 70 reels -- some at prices that had ballooned by as much as 40 percent.
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. NASA has been trying this week to buy 20 reels from Quantegy.
Tape was used to record most music after World War II. In the heyday of tape recording, it was common for rock bands to run through hundreds of reels of tape in making just one album. Over the past decade, though, the tape has been rapidly outmoded by cheaper, more convenient computer-based digital recording. Today, as few as 5 percent of albums are recorded and mixed using audio tape.
''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.''
Quantegy was founded shortly after World War II by John Herbert Orr, 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 fell off, Ampex got out of the tape business in 1995, and spun off Quantegy. 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 don't consider them to be of consistently high quality.
Wilco may have to recycle
When Wilco's Tweedy found himself in a bind, he telephoned Steve Albini, a Chicago producer and studio owner known for his work with Nirvana and the Pixies. Albini's Electrical Audio Recording is one of the last major studios in the country to rely exclusively on audiotape. 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. He tracked down around 65 reels, enough to make about 10 albums. Then, he tracked down contacts who buy odd lots of electronic equipment on the salvage market. Through one, Albini hit the motherlode: nearly 2,000 reels of 2-inch magnetic tape, enough to fill a small warehouse. Albini bought 100 reels and is trying to keep his source a secret.
Albini estimates he now has a year's worth of tape, or about 500 reels, on hand. So when Tweedy called last Friday, 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, 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, Tweedy jokes, if the tape scarcity continues, ''I'm just fearful that all the master tapes at the loft would be worth more if they were blank."
Wall Street Journal
