Reel-to-reel tape is the new vinyl
October 9, 2015 8:40 AM   Subscribe

In case you have any spare cash lying around. "I could hear the pedal squeak every time John Bonnam hit the bass drum."
posted by freakazoid (78 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I can only imagine the woo that's going to come with this trend.
posted by vuron at 8:45 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


My father had a r2r tape deck when I was young. It really did sound incredible compared to all other options at the time, and digital compression hasn't made things better. Now, I'm mostly comparing a true audiophile solution with consumer level stuff that has come since, but with that said - it isn't just woo to point out the inherent simplicity and reliability of the medium.
posted by meinvt at 8:49 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Fixing the article: At $24,000, this modded out Tascam BR-20 is a ridiculously over-engineered priced piece of gear.

The thing has all silver wiring, mu-metal insulation in case of unshielded solar flares and a fuse that has already been zapped with an ultra high voltage spark for some reason.

The idea of r2r being superior is most likely true- a direct copy of the original master will be incredibly close, but the unquestioning promotion of incredibly expensive audiophile toys rings way too many warning bells. Also, when r2r beat the turntable, how was the test conducted? Where they at least blinded, if not ABX?
posted by Hactar at 8:54 AM on October 9, 2015


Wax cylinders are also inherently simple.
posted by Foosnark at 8:55 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah, my dad had a reel-to-reel tape deck. Very early on crisp fall mornings he'd cue up his Best of Marty Robbins reel and get to work in the kitchen on potatoes and eggs for he and my brother and I before we went out for the day to cut wood.

I wonder if it's worth anything on Craigslist.
posted by notyou at 8:58 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I swear that I remember Columbia Record Club having reel-to-reel as an option in the seventies along with LPs and 8-tracks.
posted by octothorpe at 8:58 AM on October 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


Once again we are being plagued by ersatz 'audiophiles' who claim they can hear a mouse fart through the tape hiss or vinyl crackles. Look, I'm sure you can. However, if you lower the level of drugs in your system, you may discover you're suffering auditory hallucinations. Neil Young alleged his Porno system was superior as well. People can be conned. It's easy. Ask politicians. Average intelligence means there are some seriously stupid folks bringing down the score. If you feel tape and vinyl are the cat's meow by all means, go buy it. My simple request is you stop trying to tell us you've found Jesus in the photo of a dog's behind.
posted by Bdprtsma at 9:01 AM on October 9, 2015 [12 favorites]


There's still one in the basement of my folks' house, with about 20 Joan Baez reels and other misc folk stuff..
posted by k5.user at 9:04 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


> Also, when r2r beat the turntable, how was the test conducted? Where they at least blinded, if not ABX?

why must you hurt the audiophiles?
posted by boo_radley at 9:04 AM on October 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


It sounds better than a Lee Morgan trumpet riff on any audio format: CD, SACD, Pure Audio Blu-Ray, even Neil Young’s crazy 24-bit/192 kHZ hi-res files that take forever to download.

I note that no backing evidence is given for this claim. The fact of the matter is that CDs are as good as it gets for listening to audio. This claim has both empirical evidence and math to back it up. The failure mode of CD is the loudness war, which is a real but human problem. Vinyl is also very good, but has more complexities, and certain limitations as noted in the article. The real advantages of vinyl are not sound quality, but durability and physical-object-ness/artwork.

I'm not terribly familiar with the format, but reel-to-reel tape is likely very durable as well, and certainly has room for big artwork like vinyl does, but you're not really getting anything for that extra few hundred dollars. If you want a perfect copy of the audio, buy a well-mastered digital copy like CD or FLAC. 16-bit depth, 44.1 kHz sampling rate. That's still all you need, and will continue to be so, until we evolve different ears.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 9:06 AM on October 9, 2015 [10 favorites]


I guess that once the commoners started buying old Philips and Technics turntables and obscure mid 70s german and japanese amplifiers, the audiophiles had to find a new toy to feel sooooooo exclusive.
posted by lmfsilva at 9:11 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


ha, rich losers and their crazy hi-fi gear. I'll stick with a library of 320kbps mp3s that fits on something smaller than the box your latest tape release came in.

Its all conspicuous consumption with nothing to do with the "music" itself. all about "distinction".
posted by mary8nne at 9:12 AM on October 9, 2015 [7 favorites]


My folks still have their reel-to-reel deck and their small collection of 60s and 70s rock and folk plus some Christmas albums. I have always loved it. Threading the tape is a delightful experience, and all the solid chunks and thunks when you start/stop/ffwd are so satisfying. Not sure I have room for it in my apartment, but if my parents ever tried to get rid of theirs I would find a way.
posted by misskaz at 9:16 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Wouldn't these have some of the same drawbacks as cassettes (e.g. the physical medium wearing out, losing its magnetic charge, etc)? I thought tape had a (best case) lifespan of only 30 years or so.
posted by panama joe at 9:18 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Neil Young alleged his Porno system was superior as well.

It really was, though. I thought he was nuts when he said he'd be able to fill a bookshelf with Playboys and Hustlers he found in the woods behind his place, but goddamned if he didn't.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 9:19 AM on October 9, 2015 [13 favorites]


I thought tape had a (best case) lifespan of only 30 years or so.

Well, that's about 29.5 more years than it will take for whoever can afford this shit to get bored with it and move on to some other expensive hobby.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:20 AM on October 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


"I could hear the pedal squeak every time John Bonnam hit the bass drum."

And so can you! Right now, on youtube.
posted by grog at 9:24 AM on October 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


I remember a friend deciding to brush the dust off his father's reel-to-reel and run some of the old tapes in his collection, mostly old folk music concerts from bands his dad had played in. Turns out, if you let these tapes sit long enough, even in a nice temp-controlled house, the tapes start sticking, losing bits of magnetic material, and generally degrade over time. It cost him a good deal of time and money to get those ~20 year old tapes made playable. Still, as an audio format it has a lot to go for it, though on price alone it will lose out to LP and CD.
posted by Blackanvil at 9:26 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm a dedicated vinyl and vacuum tubes guy, but reel to reel is way beyond my pain-in-the-ass tolerance. I'm speaking as somebody who restored his own 1960s tube equipment and replaced all of the capacitors in his turntable--you can see the equipment here if you're curious. I know reel sounds fabulous, but the restoration and maintenance of a reel to reel setup is not trivial. The media is scarce, fragile and expensive.

A non-trivial chunk of the vinyl revival is driven by people who are buying records and slowly destroying them on cheap record players. These people will never touch reel to reel.
posted by TrialByMedia at 9:28 AM on October 9, 2015 [6 favorites]




Back when he was stationed overseas, my father-in-law had a reel-to-reel. When he was on base, he'd go to the library and check out albums. Then he'd take them home and record entire albums on the reel-to-reel tapes. When he went back overseas, he'd take his tapes and be able to listen to entire albums in a go. My husband remembers Christmas parties in Germany with all the officers standing around listening to Christmas music that his dad had recorded on his last trip back to Clarksville.

After his parents moved into their condo, we got custody of his dad's machine and tapes. As an experiment my husband and I made and effort to listen to every single tape. Just to see what was on them. Lots of Neil Diamond, lots of disco, some really awesome Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, Burl Ives Christmas music and surprisingly more Linda Ronstadt than we expected.

The sound quality isn't awesome because he was recording from albums and it was really a challenge to wade through that much Neil Diamond and Linda Ronstadt. But for the insight into what his dad wanted to listen to and what he thought was worth trekking overseas, it was awesome.
posted by teleri025 at 9:41 AM on October 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


I was another kid who grew up in a house with reel-to-reel though my dad had mostly switched to vinyl by the time I was old enough to remember.

But what really gets me about this trend is not the childhood memories, but the indignation with which my vinyl- and cassette-loving hipster friend (the one who gets super annoyed and hurt when my husband, who actually has production credits on some albums by local bands, points out that cassette tapes suck for actual audio fidelity) is snarky about the reel-to-reel hipsters. It really betrays how much of this whole "we will find a better way to play music" is about fandom tribalism and not about actual audio quality.

If you want to enjoy the ritual of the music, that's cool. The whole sitting down and putting the needle on the vinyl or threading the tape or whatever, if that rocks your world, go for it. But jfc, shut up about how your fucking audio quality is so superior when what you mean is that your taste in how to listen is so superior.
posted by immlass at 9:41 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


I swear that I remember Columbia Record Club having reel-to-reel as an option

Defin'ally. I still have a handful of pre-recorded 7in reel tapes from the 1960s /70s. There's some easy listening -- in the Montovani / 101 Stinking Strings mold -- that my parents bought, but also Inna-gadda-da-vida, Magical Mystery Tour, Sgt. Pepper's, a few others.

I only got rid of my father's old tube driven woodgrain Wollensack (with matching speakers) bought in the pre-Beatle 1960s a few years back. I still have one of my Revoxes (you need two to make Frippertronics).

"I could hear the pedal squeak every time John Bonnam hit the bass drum."

No, that was Robert Plant.
 
posted by Herodios at 9:44 AM on October 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


Oh, man...I really wanted a r2r back in the day. Settled for a sweet Nakamichi cassette deck. But, the r2r was sexy as hell.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:46 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Oh, man...I really wanted a r2r back in the day. Settled for a sweet Nakamichi cassette deck. But, the r2r was sexy as hell.

I did some dynamite recordings of live chamber music and jazz in the 1980s using Nak cassette decks, Thorzdad. Don't nak 'em.
 
posted by Herodios at 10:01 AM on October 9, 2015


At some point the price point of paying a superstar musician to come play in your living room has to cross with the price of these ridiculous audiophile setups right?
posted by Wretch729 at 10:03 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


One of my favorite toys when I was a kid was a Voice of Music r2r recorder my uncle gave me. I bought a patch cord from Radio Shack and used to record the Doctor Demento Funny Five off of the radio every week.
posted by Rob Rockets at 10:04 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


"I could hear the pedal squeak every time John Bonnam hit the bass drum."

And so can you! Right now, on youtube.


Listening to that right now on a pair of Skype-grade headphones I bought new for $2.

Sounds like tinny crap. Pedal squeak clearly audible.
posted by flabdablet at 10:06 AM on October 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


If you want to get really amazing sound from your ultra-modded reel-to-reel (or any other open-reel deck) you probably won't get it from vintage pre-recorded tapes, at least not consistently. Those tapes were the product of high-speed duplication from nth-generation submasters, didn't always use the best blank tape stock, and some labels even cut the quality by using the slower 3-3/4 ips speed (uses less tape and less duplicating time!) No, what you want is the sort of product produced by The Tape Project. They make a high-quality duplicating master directly from the original tape master, and your $450 album is made directly from that onto two 10-1/2 inch reels at 15 ips. I'll bet they sound very good indeed.

My point is, while LPs and turntables have made some sort of comeback, good analog tape is now very expensive. The best vintage machines and the technicians who know their way around them are in short supply. Folks who can afford an expensive hobby should enjoy it, but consumer reel-to-reel is a tiny niche product and that's very unlikely to change.
posted by in278s at 10:07 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


With headphones you can hear the bass drum pedal squeaking throughout several songs on the first two Beatles CDs.
posted by colie at 10:13 AM on October 9, 2015


A friend of mine who worked as a high-end studio engineer once told me that videotapes, because of their width, were great media to reccord music. <--I hope I'm not misrepresenting his view by this paraphrase.
posted by the sobsister at 10:16 AM on October 9, 2015


apropos of almost nothing, I bought an old 1/4" reel to reel tape recorder at a thrift store back in the 90s. It came with a few reels of tape, one of which was a solid two hours of 2 young women (high school age) chatting and recording gossip for their friend who was spending the summer in Ireland. I think they were from Elizabethtown PA because at one point they play the radio for their friend so she can hear some "good old rock music!" and they mention the call letters.

Sound quality was terrible though.
posted by gorbichov at 10:18 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


With headphones you can hear the bass drum pedal squeaking throughout several songs on the first two Beatles CDs.

For a mere $5,000 I will go to anyone's home with a bass drum pedal and squeak it repeatedly for two (2) entire albums' worth of music. (Double albums count as two albums, but discount rates for Frampton Comes Alive! are available.)
posted by No-sword at 10:19 AM on October 9, 2015 [11 favorites]


All things considered, a good quality tape playback system should convey audio information better than a stylus scraping through a spiral vinyl groove.
posted by davebush at 10:21 AM on October 9, 2015


The mighty Nagra stopped making reel-to-reel recorders in the 1990's, and they made the best pro field reel-to-reel recorders of the time.
posted by King Sky Prawn at 10:21 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


My dad had a reel to reel overseas too. He mostly used it on its slowest speed to record Kasey Casem's top 100 countdown on New Year's Eve. As a kid the reels were the background music to my life, as even at age 7 I was annoyed by having to flip the damn album after 20 minutes.
posted by COD at 10:24 AM on October 9, 2015


Now I've RTFA:

Then there’s the dicey issue of playback. With turntables, all sorts of mechanical foibles — rumble, skips, speed stability, inner groove distortion, et cetera — can further degrade the signal. In contrast, R2R is an exercise in simplicity. The only moving part at the point of signal retrieval is the tape, which travels in a straight line across a stationary playback head. Efficiency equals fidelity.

That is a really optimistic assessment of what goes on with magnetic tape.

During the 1980s I worked in the test engineering lab for a company that made tape backup peripherals for PC hard drives. These were used to store digital information of course, not analog audio signals, but tape has plenty of 'mechanical foibles' to consider:

Instantaneous speed variation (ISR)
Head alignment
Precision of head track to track movement
Tape alignment
Track width and isolation
Head wear
Tape wear
"Brown stain" (worn off oxide gunking up the works )
Head surface smoothness
Lubrication
Tape rigidity
Tape tension
Tape stretching
Signal strength
Contact area
Contact force
Media formulation
Substrate material
Adherence properties of the oxide layer
Humidity
Dust, hair, and other foreign materials
Magnetic field strength
Shielding from stray magnetic fields
Thermal expansion of hubs vs tape
. . .

Wow and flutter ain't in it.

A lot of these things can be got wrong in design, and a lot of them can go wrong over time.

There is an entire sub-specialty of engineering called Tribology, which deals with the science of "interacting surfaces in relative motion" (friction, lubrication and wear). It was a pretty important area of study for the engineers, and I know of at least two who were frequent contributors to the field.

The electronic, mechanical, and later digital challenges of tape were and remain manifold. There's nothing simple about it, and I cannot agree that tape is inherently mechanically simpler than phonograph.
 
posted by Herodios at 10:26 AM on October 9, 2015 [24 favorites]


Modern bass drum pedals don't squeak because they're chain-driven. You need a vintage Ludwig Speed King for that Ringo/Bonzo vibe.

Bonham tracks with squeaking clearly audible.

Ringo's finest:

"All I've Got To Do"
"Anna"
"Words of love"
posted by colie at 10:29 AM on October 9, 2015


A friend of mine who worked as a high-end studio engineer once told me that videotapes, because of their width, were great media to reccord music. --I hope I'm not misrepresenting his view by this paraphrase.

A friend of mine recorded hundreds of hours of music in his home studio in the 1980s/90s using a purpose-built deck with ADA that recorded four tracks of digital audio onto VCR tapes.

Pretty hard to find a machine to play those tapes now.
 
posted by Herodios at 10:34 AM on October 9, 2015


Wasn't reel-to-reel already an audiophile fad back in the 1970s, among those few purists who insisted tape was superior, before it became mainstream with cassettes? I'm pretty sure that's what the Pulp Fiction scene with a reel-to-reel was riffing on.
posted by koeselitz at 10:54 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


R2R machines are cool but I dunno that "reliable" is the word. And if for some reason you are very interested in hearing a drum pedal squeak you should probably record it into any 32/64-bit digital system, which will have a far lower noise floor that the fanciest tape ever made. I've said it before but sometimes it seems like audiophiles want analog recording simultaneously to distort in a pleasing way - which it can - and also to provide superior fidelity, which it does not and which is not even compatible with the first objective.
posted by atoxyl at 11:12 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Hell, I once had a reel-to-reel video recorder... an astonishing Sony device that I don't think had a single integrated circuit inside. Just stuffed with discrete transistors.

The two people I knew who had and used R2R were rather elderly, rather rich men. One was mad about jazz, the other about classical music. Both had collections of tapes that went well beyond extensive, and both had wood-lined studies with stuffed armchairs and whisky collections. I think in both cases, they had recorded a lot of concerts off the radio - Radio 3 on FM (VHF back then) was for quite some time regarded as the best source of technically excellent material. It still is superb, there was quite some fuss a couple of years ago when it experimented with compressors and it does have a (I think) 320kbps streaming option. And yes, a decent Choral Evensong delivers.

But now? So many more options. Even when high end tape absolutely was the uncontested best consumer audio medium, it was a very minority sport. By all means buy and enjoy this stuff; it is most certainly a lot of fun. Just don't pretend it's because of how it sounds.

(And recording audio on VHS video tapes was a known technique back in the day, and some studios accepted the tapes as masters. For some uses, it was the best bang/buck option. I seem to remember there was also a digital audio format that used VHS (not Nicam), but I can't quite place that.)
posted by Devonian at 11:17 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh wow. Thanks for this.

Open reel was the centerpiece of my first career - about 24 years as a broadcast and production technician. I lusted for open reel as a teenager in the 70s... finally getting my first deck and some mics when I was 16. I was able to land a summer/part-time gig as a technician at a radio & tv station, and I remember with pride when I was first able to completely align and calibrate a professional open reel deck. In my career I've maintained and aligned most makes of pro decks, including 1" & 2" multitrack. Namechecks: Ampex, Scully, Otari, MCI, Lyrec, Studer, Revox, Teac/Tascam, Nagra, Stellavox.

I agree that open-reel is still the best possible linear audio recording medium. Yes, the basic physics of impressing magnetic changes to tape is nonlinear (and I acknowledge the issues raised by Herodios), but all of these issues have been addressed by some really great engineering - high mechanical precision, careful control of tape tension, damping of the tape path, bias and equalization. Open reel is the pinnacle of the analog audio tape medium for simple reasons: the most robust tape, wide tracks and fast speed (which means the most tape particles per unit of time) and this information density means that you need to screw less with the audio to record it (easier to find optimum bias, and less extreme equalization necessary compared to smaller tape formats).

Technicalities aside, all you really need to consider is that open reel tape was mainly a professional production medium. Just about every album you heard up to the late 80s or early 90s was recorded to analog tape, and mixed down to a two-track open reel machine. Which was then used to produce the vinyl records and cassettes and 8-tracks we all bought. So, at least for the music prior to the 90s... now matter how expensive a turntable you have, that vinyl record cannot sound better than the open-reel tape it was made from.

There's no question that analog tape has some "magical" qualities. The tape nonlinearities are usually manifested as even-order harmonics which like soft tube distortion is often "musical" and pleasing. But the biggie is what analog tape does for impulses. A drum hit recorded to analog tape comes out fatter. It just does. Well into the digital revolution, when digital tape and direct-to-hard-drive workstations became dominant, it was still pretty common to push the drum tracks through one generation of analog recording to fatten them up. I believe that there are now digital plugins that can provide that fatness to drums... and we are now more accustomed to the sound of digitally-recorded drums. (or drum machines and samplers...grrr)

True story -early 90s I worked at one audio post house during the time they were transitioning to digital multitrack (SONY 3324), but for Foley recording, we still used analog multitrack, because when we recorded 'impulse' sounds - hits, bangs, kicks etc- direct to digital, they just sounded ... thin and lame.

Sorry for the digression. I still have some decks in storage, most notably an Otari MX5050 and a Stellavox SP7. Several years back I bought a slew of used-once professional tape from production houses - the archived source reels recorded on location - that they no longer needed to keep. I occasionally cruise ebay and classifieds boards for what used machines are out there, and I have noticed that the average prices have been climbing over the past year or so... and thanks to this post I now know why.

I think the CD is a darn good audio medium, but I am pretty sure that a two-track 1/4" tape running at 15ips would sound slightly better. But the costs and hassle will certainly keep me from replacing a few hundred LPs and CDs with open-reel versions.

Would I advise people to run out and buy open-reel? Unless you're a producer or engineer specifically wanting to exploit the tape artifacts... I'd say no. You can buy better-than-CD (24 bit/96kHz sampling) soundcards for under $100, or a pro-grade 24/96 recorder for about $200... and 24/96 digital is simply going to have better fidelity than any open-reel you could find for under a few thousand.

- recording digital audio to videotape - the first generation of digital audio recorders were actually boxes that 'folded up' digital audio into a video signal, which was then recorded to a video recorder. The pros used a professional U-matic video recorder (The SONY PCM-1630 was a popular pro mastering format for a time), the more consumer-oriented units could use VHS or beta. I also recall that there was a version of VHS that FM-modulated the audio onto a high-frequency carrier and recorded it along with the video, and this was superior to most open reel. Oops, digressing again

Off to check the want-ads to see just how in-demand old analog-tape engineers really are...
posted by Artful Codger at 11:33 AM on October 9, 2015 [21 favorites]


Modern bass drum pedals don't squeak because they're chain-driven. You need a vintage Ludwig Speed King for that Ringo/Bonzo vibe.

Sounds like there's a market for an add-the-pedal-squeak VST/AAX/RTAS plugin.
posted by Foosnark at 11:35 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I want the one with air bearings, but only because I used to fix tape machines with air bearings.
They were digital, though. not analog.
posted by MtDewd at 11:39 AM on October 9, 2015



Are you sure that wasn't an ADAT?

yYes. aAn oholder sssystem.

recording audio on VHS video tapes was a known technique back in the day . . . I seem to remember there was also a digital audio format that used VHS

thThe fifidelity oof mmy mememory iis leless thathan perperfect hehere, bubut DeDevonian's lilink rereminds mme thathat my friend was prolly using the ADA video thing to master / make a safety copy of content that had been originally recorded on analog tape. I think the ADA unit was Sony, but I'm still pretty sure the medium was standard VHS, not U-matic (definitely not Beta).

obObviously, ththis ppost hahas bebeen ssstored ttails owout ffor yyears, ananother pproblem thathat tatape hhhas aaand fophono ddoes nahnot.



wayway dowdown innin-sigh-ee-ide . . . .
posted by Herodios at 11:49 AM on October 9, 2015 [18 favorites]


Modern bass drum pedals don't squeak because they're chain-driven. You need a vintage Ludwig Speed King for that Ringo/Bonzo vibe.

Sounds like there's a market for an add-the-pedal-squeak VST/AAX/RTAS plugin


Over 100 classic analog pedal squeaks!

But they're pretty obscure. You're probably not familiar with them.
 
posted by Herodios at 11:51 AM on October 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


obObviously, ththis ppost hahas bebeen ssstored ttails owout ffor yyears, ananother pproblem thathat tatape hhhas aaand fophono ddoes nahnot.


wayway dowdown innin-sigh-ee-ide . . . .



Well-played (and not rewound) sir. Well-played.
posted by Artful Codger at 11:55 AM on October 9, 2015


If they like Lee Morgan, they're A-OK with me.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:57 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


obObviously, ththis ppost hahas bebeen ssstored ttails owout ffor yyears, ananother pproblem thathat tatape hhhas aaand fophono ddoes nahnot.

Point of order: tape pre-print results from heads-out storage. Besides the smoother tape pack, tails-out storage also results in post-printthrough, which sounds pleasingly like echo.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:09 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


The tape nonlinearities are usually manifested as even-order harmonics which like soft tube distortion is often "musical" and pleasing.

This is an ancient argument that one would with think could me more easily resolved with data than it seems to be but last I read tape distortion is symmetrical, primarily adding odd harmonics. Odd harmonics aren't actually bad though, and with tape I believe they are mostly low-order which may help account for the perception that it is a "warm" distortion.
posted by atoxyl at 12:15 PM on October 9, 2015


It's okay to appreciate and enjoy an obsolete medium without trying to justify it as superior in some way. "I just like it," is fine. Really.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 12:16 PM on October 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


24/96 digital is simply going to have better fidelity than any open-reel you could find for under a few thousand.

Technically, true! But, once again, with feeling, there is no benefit in listening to anything more than 16/44.1. Recording and editing? Yes, obviously. Playback? No. Buy a CD or FLAC off bandcamp.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:20 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


"...he'd go to the library and check out albums. Then he'd take them home and record entire albums on the reel-to-reel tapes."

Same here. There wasn't a better audio quality for most of Dad's stuff (particularly from library stuff), but the long-play was better, and he played around with compilation stuff, which made it personal.

Eventually, there was deterioration to the tapes, and the machine (gorgeous as it was) became a massive doorstop, and was tossed. It was sad to see it go, but more as an article of personal attachment than any loss in techmology.

That said, Dad did record my sister and I as kids using the reel-to-reel. If there was any high-quality audio the machine was used for, that would probably have been it. So now those are inaccessible, which is a loss on one hand, and cringe-avoidance on the other.
posted by Capt. Renault at 12:30 PM on October 9, 2015


This is an ancient argument that one would with think could [b]e more easily resolved with data than it seems to be but last I read tape distortion is symmetrical, primarily adding odd harmonics. Odd harmonics aren't actually bad though, and with tape I believe they are mostly low-order which may help account for the perception that it is a "warm" distortion.

I have to concede this. As I was writing I was visualizing the tape transfer curve from 0 to saturation, when in fact it's from one polarization to another which is indeed symmetrical. Thanks for the correction.

As you point out, the soft knee as the transfer curves approach saturation result in more low-order components, compared to hard clipping.

Man some old neurons are being fired...
posted by Artful Codger at 12:31 PM on October 9, 2015


I have an old r2r in the garage. I bought it in the early '80s because I wanted better fidelity and reliability than cassettes. But it was really kind of a pain in the ass so it never got much use. It certainly hasn't seen the light of day in at least 20 years.

I looked it up on ebay a few years ago, and it was only getting $100 or so. Hardly worth the trouble of packing and sending it off. The thing weighs 30+ pounds. I should check the current prices and see if its getting much more now. There's a few recordings I have on it that I'd like to transfer to the computer. If the belt hasn't rotted, it should still be working fine.
posted by DarkForest at 1:16 PM on October 9, 2015


> "I could hear the pedal squeak every time John Bonnam hit the bass drum."

Who the hell is John Bonnam? Doesn't anybody bother with copyediting any more?
posted by languagehat at 1:17 PM on October 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


I remember that my parents tape or Bridge Over Troubled Waters was on the reel backwards, so that the play order was B side first, then A side. I can't listen to that on CD without thinking something is wrong with the play order. Anyway, The Boxer is a pretty good lead off track.
posted by wotsac at 1:30 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


"I could hear the pedal squeak every time John Bonnam hit the bass drum."

I love that this is held out as some kind of indicator of quality. When I used to hear my bass pedal squeak when we played back our "master" tapes (i.e., standard 60 minute cassettes recorded in 4-track mode - hello, 1992) I would oil my goddamn pedal before the next take.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 2:30 PM on October 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


I would oil my goddamn pedal before the next take.

Seriously. If you broke a string, would you not replace it?

Now I need to go find whichever song it was on Betty where you can hear Page Hamilton hiss "Shit!" in the amplifier mic during one of his weirdo solos.
posted by Existential Dread at 2:50 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]




I swear that I remember Columbia Record Club having reel-to-reel as an option in the seventies along with LPs and 8-tracks.

Seconding that this was a thing, according to Voices of Nostalgia's account of CRC's history:
The Columbia Record Club continued to evolve with the times selling stereo records and equipment in 1959, reel-to-reel recordings in 1960 and then moving on to 8-track cartridges (1966) and then cassette tapes in 1969. Such was the individual nature of each new format (and presumably the unknown possible success and longevity or not) that they were given their own specialist clubs so the reel-to-reel sales were under the auspices of the Columbia Reel-to-Reel Club, cartridges under the Columbia Cartridge Club etc. This also meant if one of the clubs suffered financial problems it would not directly impact upon the other clubs with differing formats.
A friend of mine who worked as a high-end studio engineer once told me that videotapes, because of their width, were great media to reccord music.

At our little college radio station in the early 2000s, our engineer brought in a VCR to record his show once, because it could record longer and with better quality than what we had in the studio at the time. It looked funky, but the guy knew how to keep our station running, so I never questioned him. He ended up working for a company that designed radio hardware with increasing levels of software integration, and he came back to our station to run beta-versions on our boards, so I'm pretty sure he knew what he was doing with those old VCRs. (We also had reel to reel gear in a room, but I don't know if it was wired to anything for playback, let alone recording.)
posted by filthy light thief at 3:19 PM on October 9, 2015


More on the VHS stuff

VHS Hifi had audio modulating HF carriers and recorded by the spinning video head for better fidelity.

The VHS deck I was thinking of earlier was the Toshiba DX-900. It's unique because it is the only VHS deck I know with a PCM audio record/playback interface built-in.
posted by Artful Codger at 3:48 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I remember that my parents tape or Bridge Over Troubled Waters was on the reel backwards, so that the play order was B side first, then A side. I can't listen to that on CD without thinking something is wrong with the play order. Anyway, The Boxer is a pretty good lead off track.

I have such fond memories of falling asleep in my parents' bed (at about age 5, when for a year or so I was both a terrible insomniac and an unreliable sleepwalker) listening to a reel-to-reel of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years" or some other Simon and Garfunkel.

And yet, when my father died, the only reel to reel tapes I found were things like "Johnny Puleo and His Harmonica Gang." I tossed them, ultimately, but not before documenting their amazing names and cover art.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 4:36 PM on October 9, 2015


> our engineer brought in a VCR to record his show once, because it could record longer and with
> better quality than what we had in the studio at the time.

The VCR audio tracks were the first consumer-level digital audio. Very much worth using even if you cared nothing for the video aspect.
posted by jfuller at 5:34 PM on October 9, 2015


I'm sitting not more than 6 feet from both a r2r machine AND a kick drum pedal. I had no idea it was such a goldmine. I also have about 25 reels of tape recordings dating back to the early 50s. My father was a classical musician and these are some early broadcast recordings. I look forward to digitizing them (should they still be playable).

Having recently got into drumming and micing and recording drum kits, I am going to try bouncing a drum track onto the r2r and back to see how it fattens up. I think it is hard to find new tape now though. I do have an unused reel or two that are about 30 years old now. (How did that happen?)
posted by SNACKeR at 6:48 PM on October 9, 2015


Came here to snark about all these snobs and nobody spotting Bonham, but languagehat has the scoop. Tsk, The Verge, and in a pull quote too
posted by bonaldi at 6:59 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh, and:

I can't wait until the audiophiles discover the fidelity that one can get with SACD recordings.

They're already there. But it's not squeaky drum pedals, it's Jackson's fingers clicking during Billie Jean
posted by bonaldi at 7:17 PM on October 9, 2015


so that's what that little graphic on the LCD screen of my TASCAM digital recorder is all about.
posted by randomkeystrike at 7:27 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


One of the finest recordings I ever heard (made outside of a studio) was made at the desk at a live John Fahey concert using 1-inch-wide tape on a Crown tape recorder fed by some pricey condensor mikes. All John's beery noises included. For only $2500, 1980.

Listening to it was OMG superior to live. A cassette dub directly from it was a prized possession for years (and was still so good I could dub from it and enjoy that). In my experience you cannot get this kind of sound quality - in the field - in a better way. BUT: baby those tapes, because (apart from the expense, if you can find one) they will slowly deteriorate from heat, humidity, temperature, and stray electromagnetic fields.

For everything else (including A LOT CDs), an MP3 cut at a bitrate as high as your ears can hear the difference is every bit as good. And can be endlessly backed-up at virtually no cost.
posted by Twang at 9:21 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


VHS Hifi had audio modulating HF carriers and recorded by the spinning video head for better fidelity.

Such a devious technology: it seemed like the audio data was, uh, kinda hidden inside the video signal. VHS Hifi audio was really good quality for a reasonable price in the late 1980's. But it was tricky to edit or layer. Good for logging or back-ups.
posted by ovvl at 9:35 PM on October 9, 2015


A friend of mine who worked as a high-end studio engineer once told me that videotapes, because of their width, were great media to record music.

VHS is horrible tape stock. 7-10 yrs max. It works but ...well...for so many reasons isn't viable.
There is a reason good tape is good tape. Back in my broadcast days..mass dubs were sent out on 5 in reels. Very cheap. It was just dub to cart and that was it. Beyond that...it was fairly useless. That is VHS. Good R2R reels...are THICK. The dense nature of them is the reason they are so good. A good BASF 15 in reel will last for years and years thru spicing and all sort of abuse and never lose a bit of quality. BTW...the erase head on any r2r deck isn't capable of erasing worth a shit....a r2r doesn't have that function anyway. It just overwrites. A bulk eraser is the way to clean a tape. There is a magic act one has to preform when doing so....LOL...some of you might even know the dance.
posted by shockingbluamp at 10:24 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


A drum hit recorded to analog tape comes out fatter. It just does.

I'd just LOVE to see an oscilloscope comparison of a drum hit recorded on analog and one recorded on digtal, with an engineer looking at them and pointing: "There! There's the fatness!"

Terms like "warmth", "presence", "depth", "soundstage", "fatness" etc. always get thrown around by audiophiles when really we're only dealing with two things: frequency and amplitude. Those are the ONLY two things that affect a sound. They can both easily be manipulated in the studio until they sound exactly as they were intended to. (even moreso in the digital age)

Analog vs. digital has been tested time and time again, with little to no discernible difference in double-blind (or even single-blind) tests.
posted by ShutterBun at 10:31 PM on October 9, 2015


really we're only dealing with two things: frequency and amplitude.

Our two chief things are frequency, amplitude and phase...

Amongst our things are frequency, amplitude, phase, noise and intermodulation...

I'll come in again.
posted by flabdablet at 11:19 PM on October 9, 2015 [8 favorites]


Michael Jackson drove Quincy Jones mad with his demands in the studio, and one of them was for 'a touch more garlic salt' on the snare drum in Billie Jean.
posted by colie at 2:45 AM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


moi: A drum hit recorded to analog tape comes out fatter. It just does.

ShutterBun: I'd just LOVE to see an oscilloscope comparison of a drum hit recorded on analog and one recorded on digtal, with an engineer looking at them and pointing: "There! There's the fatness!"


Actually, you can. You can also, in this digital age, load the analog-recorded signal back into a digital editor, subtract the original signal from it, and you will see/hear how the signal was changed.

In fairness I should have mentioned that the impulse fatness* comes from driving the tape hard, so that the signal peaks are entering the nonlinear part of the saturation curve. The gentle knee of tape saturation provides useful processing and it makes analog tape more forgiving of the occasional signal overload. Digital recording systems have a hard upper limit; exceed it and the offending peaks just get clipped off, which sounds bad.

*This is different from phatness. The latter wasn't invented til the 90s
posted by Artful Codger at 4:06 AM on October 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


@shutterbun - not sure what tests you mean - the side effects of recording to tape are real, and are many and well-known. For a gentle introduction see http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb10/articles/analoguewarmth.htm

This is not monster-cable-level subtlety we're talking, but rather audible technical limitations of analog that can have a desirable effect the same way tubes can.

Maybe you have a hard time with fuzzy terms like warm, which can be subjective.
posted by SNACKeR at 7:28 AM on October 10, 2015


Reel after reel of ... pretty much every ... sound you can imagine if you've ever seen an early 80's porno flick.

Another kind of analog warmth, I suppose.

I hope you threw out the mics.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:19 AM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


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