Albums reissued on reel-to-reel tape
Dave Katznelson of the marvelous Birdman Records pointed me to The Tape Project, an interesting subscription service for reissues of great music on reel-to-reel audio tape. Each release, from Sonny Rollins's "Saxophone Colossus" to Jacqui Naylor's "The Number White," comes on an engraved reel in a leather case and includes cover art printed on high-quality claycoat paper. Depending on the subscription package, each release costs around $129. From The Tape Project site:
LinkQ: Why are you doing this?
A: Most people have not had the experience of hearing studio master tapes. Many formats have been introduced with the promise of bringing master tape sound into the home listening room.
Yeah, right.
We don’t expect that this tape project will replace any of your other favorite formats, so we see no need to dwell on the drawbacks of any other format. Suffice it to say that we don’t offer an “analog-like” listening experience. We are offering a chance to have in your own listening room an actual analog listening experience as close to the original master tape as practical.
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What are the odds of the average music fan having the audio equipment necessary to notice any appreciable difference in quality?
What are the odd of an average adult having the hearing acuity necessary to notice any appreciable difference in quality?
Zero. All the difference is up above 22,050 Hz, and hardly any children can hear that high.
JS7A: that's not true; reel-to-reel tape has higher dynamic range than a CD (the difference between the quietest and the loudest sounds). The difference would be most noticeable on classical music recordings, which typically get their dynamic range compressed to sound decent on a CD (boost the quieter sounds, limit the loud ones).
Not only owning a high quality tape machine but also maintaining one is fairly impractical.
Because of this, an analogue master would potentially sound worse in many listening situations than a digital master.
I however can't think of many things sexier than a running tape machine!
1/4 inch reel-to-reel has better SNR than red book audio?
Q: How are the tapes made?
A: Our duplication process begins with the actual analog master tape. From that we make analog running masters on one inch two-track format. The one inch tape format transfer results in a extremely low loss of information, which we consider more like 1/2 generation than one full generation.
They can consider it whatever they want. It's still a FULL generation. And yes, there is definitely loss/noise going on here.
These running masters are copied in real time to a bank of finely tweaked Ampex ATR-100 decks, yielding a "1-1/2 generation" copy. You just aren't going to get any closer to the original master, short of buying a record label or two.
Actually there are several record labels that go straight from studio master vinyl to father to mother to home copy. With a lot less noise/bleed than you'd get on this tape nonsense.
At 15 inches per second, if the dynamic range was actually better than red book (CDs) then they would say all over their site.
two-track 1/4" is pretty good. i just silently hope they are simply taping the analog outs of a regular CD player (remember those?? they played audio CDs only! no mp3, photo CDs, VCD, DVDs, blue-ray... they couldn't even burn!)
What I don't get is that while tape might have greater dynamic range, that is almost certainly counteracted by tape hiss. I fail to see how this is addressed here on typical high end 70s tape machines (of which I have). Also, I think that any perceived advantage tape might have is surely overcome with SACD audio.
But it is still kinda cool from a geeky perspective.
Being a mastering engineer, mainly dealing with analogue tape and it's transfer into the digital realm, I have often thought that people are missing the original dynamics and warmth of tape. That said, I'm sure that the average joe doesn't want a several hundred pound Otari or Studer tape machine sitting in their listening space.
Tape hiss is not an issue for Reel to Reel tape as much as it was for cassette tapes. You are dealing with a larger magnetic surface, plus at much higher speeds 15 to 30 ips, anything less than that and then you can start to worry about noise.
What I would like to see, is 1/2" 2 track tape, that is what I deal with on production masters and the sound is just FAN-FRICKEN-TASTIC.
ydj
The term 'analog,' as I understand it, is a little strained in the context of recording tape. I used to fix tape machines for a little while after high-school, half a lifetime ago. As I (dimly) remember it, magnetic domains on tape are too small to directly support AF. So the Germans got the lightbulb of FM-ing a (if memory serves) roughly 14Mhz 'bias oscillator,' in order to develop the technology. This makes it more like an indirect-analog technique, depending on your mathematical viewpoint on this modulation scheme. So, something like a PLL would have to be used to encode-recover the AF.
@Joe: Say what? CDs allow 96 dB SNR. A quick Google is showing people talking about 60-70dB on tape.
I gotta say, 15ips on 1/4" is not all that impressive, it's certainly not any better than your average CD, and it may or may not be better than any particular CD. Any time you remaster a disc, you have the opportunity to use the tools and knowledge and ears that you didn't last time; that can make a much bigger difference than the brand of capacitors in your tape machine.
My first impression upon reading the article was "Snake Oil!" just because it seems so new-agey: "we'll give you this custom-weighted artistic leather binder to offset the magnetic flux of the print-through..".
Yet the people involved do seem to know what they're doing. Paul Stubblebine is a well-respected mastering engineer. And it's not as if they're saying "Go out and buy junky old reel-to-reel drives so you can play our formats!" They apparently will guide you toward the purchase of an appropriate class of tape machine, and will help you with custom mods, etc. to overhaul it. In short, they sound like good people who are trying to do the right thing.
To them, doing the right thing is taking recent music that was originally mastered on 2TR 1-inch and remastering it down to 2TR 1/4" @15ips. I guess in the right hands, with the right gear, on the right music, that could come out better than a traditional master-to-disk session. But, again, on the other hand, I've used ONE-track 1/4" at 15IPS a few times - to take a "too clean song" and give it some nice tape saturation and grunge. Not what we're talking about here.
The cases look pretty, anyway. And if their forums are to believed, they're selling to people who think absolute phase makes a perceptible difference in output, so the rest is just eye candy anyway.
Awww! I grew up with a Grundig reel-to reel tape recorder in our living room flat in London, where my mum used to record the daily sounds of her and two toddlers (my brother and me) learning to talk. I was fascinated by the little green light on the front of the machine, and the odd, plasticky smell it emitted when it was warm.
Many years later, I managed to find one in a local second hand store, for a bargain £15, and I'll never get rid of it.
It actually came in very handy a couple of years ago when my Uni drama company was doing a production of Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape", and I lent it to them. They thought they'd never find one, and were really grateful.
I love the way it has a carrying handle on it, too. It weighs a tonne.
This is all part of the "tubes have a warmer sound" crowd. It's best to just let them have their fantasies.
The leather might look pretty, but it's a terrible idea to store your magnetic tape near it. But then again, who cares? Your $130 reel of tape is only gonna last 10-30 years, even under ideal conditions. For a retrofantastic musical listening experience, my money's (still) on vinyl.
Well "Moon", tubes DO sound warmer than transistors in many cases-- I've owned many guitar amps over the years, and even the best solid-state amps were harsh sounding at high volume, whereas tube amps distort pleasantly. Some people like the harsh tone of non-tube amps, and that's fine, so it's all matter of taste I guess. With home stereo systems the difference is less apparent, and how much money do you really need to spend on a stereo?
As for reel-tapes, I would LOVE to have a nice Studer/Revox tape machine and a collection of decent tapes. I know tape collectors who have great old reels, The Zombies, Miles Davis, Allman Brothers live (the Fillmore East reel tapes have a very different mix than the vinyl). BUT, I don't have the money or time or space to go down that path. Besides, certain recording aren't going to sound better on reels or cds or anything-- all the original Robert Johnson and Charlie Parker recordings were done on 78rpm acetates, but the magic and fire is still there: would you rather hear Bird off an old acetate, or Kenny G in pristine digital sound? There is no perfect sound, even hearing something live is imperfect-- you have to deal with crowd noise, crappy amplification in clubs, your own tinnitus. . . . I remember a friend who hated vinyl because any small surface noise "crackle" distracted him, and yet he didn't have a problem listening to a live guitarist playing around a campfire which produced non-stop crackles and pops.
We shouldn't worry so much about reproducing the absolute ultimate in audio fidelity, rather doing the best that is reasonable, and focus more on the quality of the music being performed; Ornette Coleman used to play on a plastic sax and Hound Dog Taylor played a crappy Japanese guitar, but the music they made is still great. I'd rather hear them on their sub-par instruments than a recent Berklee or GIT graduate on the most expensive instruments available.