Reel to Reel decks

Astralography,

Very well written & I couldn't agree more.
Thanks for the great explanation.

I'll just toss in one other thing here I have recently found out in the last few weeks. In the recording world today, most of the analog "purists" are still missing the point because "most" of them are using tape machines only for tracking and not mix down. They are tracking on a tape machine, but then dumping those tracks into a computer software program such as "Pro Tools" and then continue to hack up and edit the mixes to death.

A "true purist" would mix onto another tape machine.. preferably a high quality two track (half track) open reel, then use that tape to make any cuts or splices with the good old fashion razor blade on the splicing block. That tape would act as a master and a couple clones would be made from that such as one for a safely backup and one to be sent off to the vinyl cutting lathe. The bigger pro studios would use 2" tape usually Studer machines and smaller studios could still release excellent quality product mixing down onto 1/2 tape or even 1/4 inch tape stereo masters.

I don't know how many artists are doing it the right way anymore, I would guesstimate very very few.

People seem to think that they are saving their music by safely dumping it into a computer.. and that their will be no generation loss..

However..

What people forget is that the initial analog to digital conversion is very destructive and remember, it must be converted AGAIN back out of digital format to be understood by our very human ANALOG ears. So it gets hit twice.

I would not fear two generations of analog tape conversions to get something pressed on vinyl which is now "ironically" being hailed actually as the best possible format for archiving music (about 100 years)

CD life span is suggested at about 30 years max.

True that about vinyl. Think about it as a long term archive only vinyl discs will stand the test of time. Sure they must be properly stored but they will be playable at any time in the future with a simple turntable and playback stylus.

Analogue tape is a convenient archive of analogue but it will degrade worse as time passes compared to vinyl. Yes, if you use a good tape medium and proper storage you will get good long term storage with analogue tape.

Digital storage be it on an optical disc, hard disc or flash card will likely not be playable unless you routinely recopy it as time passes. Not only is there fear of a hard disc failure but if your playback machine lacks the ability to read and play what would inevitably be obsolete storage medium you could wind up having a properly stored digital medium setup that just wont be able to be read by any future computer play back set up.

Astralography,

Three letters: AAA

From T.H.E. Show, Newport Beach (where the best sonics where evident in rooms featuring RTR and vinyl and where RTR, vinyl, and digital formats were front-end options).

Astralography, I agree on the need to use analog from one end to the other in the recording process.

When my band has released its LPs, although they had set up the studio before I joined the group, none of them had experience editing a master with a razor blade so I wound up with that task. Fortunately there was not a lot of that to do- we did our recordings 'live' which is to say while we did use a multi-track recorder, we did not do any over-dubs.

We kept 24-bit backup digital files too, scanned at double the redbook frequency to avoid the use of a brickwall filter. Compared to the 2-channel analog tape, the digital files essentially fall flat on their respective faces.