LAST MAGNETIC TAPE FACTORY CLOSES!!! YIKES!!!

[Mbira]

DIY Tape?

 

[Greg]

I've been using Quantegy 1" reels for some time... I just got in a shipment of 10 reels two days ago, which might last me till the middle of February. I wonder if I should order another batch of 25 or 50 or something just so I don't **** myself because a 1" 16 track is all I have to record on.

Or maybe it's time for me to shell out some dough for a fuckload of good converters and Pro Tools or some **** like that. I have no experience in the digital domain and things have been working well for me in the analog domain... and it would really bum me out if at some point in the near future I couldn't get any more new open reels.

 

[amorris]

i heard some people say that the difference of analog tape can be simulated with filters. now i hope those people can get to writing some decent code. does anybody know the time frame between when tubes became taboo and the recent tube mania? i just want to set my rip van winkle alarm clock.

 

[Gold]

Analog tape might not be a big market but it is a market. Us audio people are nuts anyway. I'm sure there are a couple of people who would buy it and be willing to make less than a bean counter would like.

The death of vinyl was highly overrated. There are still three companies making lacquer disks for mastering. Now that's a small market.

 

[gyraf]

[quote author="amorris"]i heard some people say that the difference of analog tape can be simulated with filters.[/quote]

They would need to UNDERSTAND the difference first. And that cannot (to now) be described algorithmically, hence there's no way to do a transfer function.

Try it with one of those convolution thingys - "sample" the sound of your tape recorder, and see what it does. It comes nowhere near what we like about tape.

The problem lies in a wast amount of non-linearily interconnected parameters from both level- and time- or frequency-domain..

MANY plugin-programmers have tried - and believe me, some of those guys are frightening good with DSP's - but noone has been able to come up with anything useable. It would be a huge market if possible, so I don't think there's a single plugin manufacturer not trying to do this..

Jakob E.

 

[tjacobson]

I was told by someone reputable that the tape industry for the most part has been drivin by the cassette industry so does this mean the death of cassetes? What about VHS tape and all of the other tape formats?

 

[NewYorkDave]

It sucks for us, but it really sucks for those Quantegy workers who returned to the plant to find themselves locked out.

This scene is playing itself out time and time again as American manufacturing goes the way of the zeppelin. Oh wait, they're making zeppelins again... I guess anything's possible.

I'm not going to panic. I remember when the word on the street was that tubes and parts for tube circuits were going to become unavailable. I also remember the much-hyped "death of vinyl" about fifteen or twenty years ago.

There are at least as many people in the audio tape "niche market" as there are buying tube amps and turntables. And there's still an institutional demand from archivists, who (rightfully so, in my opinion) continue to archive important material on tried-and-trusted analog formats rather than the latest flavor-of-the-week digital formats.

As long as there's a need, and money to be made, someone will find a way to cater to the market. Tape will become more expensive and harder to find--and this has been the case for the past several years anyway--but I don't think it will become unavailable altogether for at least another decade.

The sad part is that the tape of the future will probably not be made in this country. The erosion of the American manufacturing base is a personal hot-button issue for me, but I won't launch into a political screed just now.

 

[Mark Burnley]

[quote author="NewYorkDave"] The erosion of the American manufacturing base is a personal hot-button issue for me, but I won't launch into a political screed just now.[/quote]

Don't start me either, but I think this article by Rod Elliott is required reading!

We'll find a way to keep the reels turning.

Tape is the only way for a certain style of recording.



Mark

 

[NewYorkDave]

This is also required reading as far as I'm concerned, at least for those of us in the States.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0446577448/104-1615508-4741542?v=glance

 

[Kev]

:sad: :roll:

it's all bad

outsourcing and tax and globalisation ...

I fly home today
try to get some sleep
get up in the morning and head for work
I hope I still have a job

the dead line for voluntary redundancy is in a couple of weeks and after that we will see if they go to IN-voluntary redundancies ... retrenchments

I know I'm in the firing line

could be that I will soon have much time for DIY

 

[NewYorkDave]

The outsourcing hatchet was recently swung in my direction as well. I survived, but there's more of the same coming down the pike.

 

[soundguy]

the sky is falling crowd really isnt seeing the economics of this at all. Tape will first get REALLY expensive before it just disappears. Quantegy is having trouble, big deal. I mean, it sucks for quantegy, but as a corporation, their overhead is enormous. If this means that a company will buy them and manufacture tape ONLY and then retail it for 2-3 times where it is at now, so be it. You'll at least see someone TRY to do that first as there is a huge market for tape even though its not a get rich and have three vacation homes market. The film industry alone is proof enough that at least 1/4" for now has a legitimate demand. On an average job, I'll roll 3-4 7" reels a day and figure the average job is about 40 shooting days. Every single person I know on a TV show is still rolling tape with some kind of digital backup, hell, the west wing ran three different formats last time I was over there. The time to panic is when the stuff becomes unavailable and if it becomes unavailable Im sure it will become available after that. I personally cant afford to go on some binge and buy tape for the rest of my career. I mean, even if I could afford to buy 20 or 30 reels of 2" tape, in the big picture, how long is that gonna last me? Year and a half, if Im ultra conservative? then what? I dont know, perhaps Im wrong and the world is actually ****** but I just cant draw that conclusion from the information presented.

If tape gets made in the czech republic, sucks for american union workers, but we still have tape. This will definitely happen before tape disappears off the face of the earth.

dave

 

[Bear]

The magnetic strips on credit cards are the same stuff. Consumer video tape formats and even cassette tape are sticking around. The question is whether somebody wants to tool up to periodically produce the formulations pros want in the sizes they demand. Don't expect it to be cheap if it happens.

Bear

 

[rich]

[quote author="Gold"]Analog tape might not be a big market but it is a market. Us audio people are nuts anyway. I'm sure there are a couple of people who would buy it and be willing to make less than a bean counter would like.

The death of vinyl was highly overrated. There are still three companies making lacquer disks for mastering. Now that's a small market.[/quote]


Not to be a pessimist but it seems to me that the market for vinyl is much bigger than the specialized market of 2" analog tape. Plus I'm not really sure but wouldn't the making of analog tape take a major operation to produce vs. the small mom and pop operations that are able to produce vinyl. The fact that they charge a fortune for the stuff as it is might be an indication of the kind of capital and size of an operation it might take to produce 2" analog tape. Maybe the Chinese will come to the rescue.

 

[soundguy]

I may be wrong, but the difference between 1/4" and 2" is slittting... There's a market for 1/4" tape. A big one.

The real question here is how long it will take to deplete the current stock of tape on planet earth and how long it will take a new company to gear up in the meantime. The problem here is with the people that make it, not the machines that make it... If a new company were to get involved, if they cant hire some of the chemists back to work, things can be very bad... Remember what happened with agfa...

Its hard to imagine this being anything beyond a corporate restructuring but maybe Im being hopefull. Think about it, no more tape on planet earth? It doesnt seem very plausable that someone inst going to step in and take a bite out of that (ahem) world (as in the entirety of planet earth) demand.

dave

 

[bradzatitagain]

[quote author="Bear"]The magnetic strips on credit cards are the same stuff. Consumer video tape formats and even cassette tape are sticking around. The question is whether somebody wants to tool up to periodically produce the formulations pros want in the sizes they demand. Don't expect it to be cheap if it happens.

Bear[/quote]

The issue is the tooling for slitting open reel audio tape. The best tape slitting machinery on the planet, Emtec's, was scrapped after nobody bought it at the auction. The issue isn't chemistry, it's machinery. I would imagine there is a film manufacturing issue too, maybe DuPont or whoever was making the polyester film doesn't want to make it anymore. It's more complicated than magnetic media formulation recipes and I'm sure it's a typical incestuous corpo kind of product the required materials for which are made by two or three manufactureres that hate each other.

I'm also sure NASA is shitting themselves right now, trying to figure out how they're going to make their decks works. The open reel data tape is slit on the same machinery as the audio tape.

If anyone can point me to a corpo website where ANY OTHER corporation advertises the manufacture of open reel tape, both data and audio, hit us all back and share. Chinese and Russian com panies, too, go find one. There ain't one.

I don't think the sky is falling but the simple fact is there is now a limited supply of new Quantegy tape. Somebody else might make some but it won't be Quantegy. Quantegy has been, in one corporate form or another, making tape for over 50 years; Kurt at USRecording said it ALWAYS outsold any Emtec BASF or Agfa they sold. That's not to say it was better, it wasn't. Studers can rewind a 10&1/2 reel of 1/4" BASF tape without needing flanges, & they can pack the tape flat at rewind and fast forward speeds because the machines were designed around BASF tape.

If your machines are presently aligned for 456, buy some extra, for 406, buy some extra, for 632, etc. etc. etc. I don't think this a cattle call for a stampede. But it is a definite event and it is worth paying attention to. Anyone who is asking if cassettes are going to be affected isn't paying attention. The even that occured was: the last tape factory that was producing open reel audio tape on proprietary slitting machinery (the ONLY precise slitting machinery left on the damned planet) closed on the 24th of December 2004.

Make up your own damned mind what you want to do. It's a newsworthy event, so stop trying to frost my ass for bringing it to your attention.

There's a rumor that ATR Services will begin offering tape for purchase sometime in the near future. I WOULD THINK: 1)Don't expect to be able to buy old formulas that you can succesfully bias on your 350 or 351 or 354 or 440 or MM1000, expect to be able to buy formulas that can be biased on Mike's machines or ATR 100's and maybe newer Studers; 2) Don't expect, should ATR Services offer tape in the future, for it to be cheap or for ATRs or Studers to get any cheaper (if your think $6k is cheap for a 2-track machine.) 3) It's going to be expensive to make new slitting machinery for open reel tape--I wouldn't have much faith in the ATR Services rumor even if he sells 2-tracks for $6K a piece, Mike would need a group of investors to start a tape manufacturing company and investors would soon wrest control away from Mike, if Mike ever has control of it in the first place, so you'll be able to buy what corpo bean counters think you ought to have.

If you regularly work on a high density track width Tascam or Otari call your tape vendor and ask THEM what you think you ought to do, if you happen to trust their opinion. Then call Mike Spitz and ask him if he's going to provide a tape that will work on 8 track 1/2" machines or if you'll only be able to get some ultra high bias tape that will work on one of his 2 track 1/2" machines w/ custom electronics at $4K per channel.

There's a difference between being a panic artist and being cynical. If I've failed in expressing my cynicism, allow me to take a moment and straighten things out: I am cynical. I cynically view the future of open reel tape. If you want a little extra tape that you already know the characteristics of, go buy some before all the Quantegy is gone. I have no idea how long that might take, 1 month, 6 months, who the hell knows.

Alrighty then. Not everyone cares about this or is even phased by it, that's fine (or, who cares?) If I hadn't said anything at all there would be more tape for me to buy. So count me as cynical and stupidly generous. I'm satisfied to cart around those two lumps of baggage, thanks, but I'll skip the panic artist moniker, thank you very much. The sky seems perfectly intact, Dave.

rgrds,
Brad

 

[Svart]

I guess we all have to face it. just like everything else, the use of tape WILL come to an end someday. I track to an MX-2424. I 've never used tape and probably never will now. :?

 

[bradzatitagain]

From Kurt at sales at USRcording, today after he left the office, SCOOZI, I mis read his post, this was at THE BEGINNING of his day today, MONDAY morning, 3 January 2005:

[quote author="Kurt"]As far as immediate product availability, we're pretty much cleaned out except for some 456. All the GP9 is gone except for a few 7" reels and a few cases of 1/2". We have a few cases of 456 2", 1" , 1/2" and 1/4" left from what I hear, but most of that has been allotted to "pending" orders for existing customers. There's a few straggler rolls of 499 left, but that's it.
Where were these people when it was needed? We got an order for 200 cases of GP9 2". 120 cases of GP9 1". Etc.[/quote]

And their **** is EXPENSIVE. But maybe I'm making all of this up to just f&#k with you all.

rgrds,
Brad

 

[SonsOfThunder]

[quote author="Mark Burnley"]but I think this article by Rod Elliott is required reading![/quote]

[quote author="NYDave"]This is also required reading as far as I'm concerned, at least for those of us in the States.[/quote]

I could tell you guys a little story based on my observations from the manufacturer's side of the car stereo world that would shed a lot of light on this subject for all, IMO. But instead, I'll stop and point to Walmart as we did in another thread.

"Corporate Greed" is as much to blame for our current state of affairs (worldwide) as the "Consumerist Society" that we all live in. We all want more for less. So do the Chinese people who are now making most of the products stocked at yer local WalMart. I really think this is all a result of or world becoming "smaller" (Global Economy) and it will probably continue until it comes back around on itself.

In the 60's and 70's, Japan sold a lot of products that we called "cheep junk" here in the States, in the 70's and 80's they made a lot of our consumer electronics, today Japan is manufacturing mostly high-technology products like PC motherbds and memory chips. And what has happened to the average person's standard of living in the last 40 yrs in that country? Lower tech jobs have moved away from Japan, first to Malaysia and Korea and now they are migrating to China. It will take a lot longer to have a wide effect in China, obviously, but they are already moving production facilities to the north in order to take advantage of workers with lower wage demands.

Last year, Buick sold 3 times as many of the Regal in China as they did in the US. And they were made in China as well...

Peace!
Charlie

 

[soundguy]

hey brad-

not trying to insult you, it just seems a little early to freak out, thats all Im suggesting. Quantegy has still not said boo about this and until they do this IMO is very much the sky is falling. Closing the factory and laying off employees may simply be the directive handed down by a legal team in order to aide in the restructuring of a business more than a concrete end of all media. I do not know the caveats of bankruptcy law in GA and its quite possible that the actions Q has taken are rooted in some footnote of the law. None of us are privy to the complexities of corporate nonsense, so for now, who knows. there is probably enough stock out there on *EARTH* to last I would think many many months which will hopefully be enough time for Q to provide some kind of press release, after all, this only effects several industries dependant upon media for the entire planet. Im certainly not trying to down play the importance of this, just seems a little early to panic, thats all. Hopefully in a month we'll see Q sell their manufacturing division to a new company, hopefully the old employees will get their jobs back at a salary close enough for them to justify going back to work and a lot of people will have freaked out for absolutely no reason. Either that or we are all terribly terribly terribly ******, so ******, in fact, that spending $5K or $10K on tape stock does little to unfuck the problem, we are talking about buying enough tape to last the rest of our lifetimes...

just when you thought it was cool that your car came with a cd player instead of a cassette deck. Trickle down economics is a rightous bitch.

dave