Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - 2inch Analog Recording VS Hardware Recording?

GL Respect Due · 5th May 2006

I can only speak on 2" tape, but my understanding is that Quantegy has a German distibutor that is actively building different formats/sizes of tape. They quoted me $250 for a reel of 499. $195 for 456 (which I prefer to print to). I agree you can hit 499 hotter, but that doesn't always translate very well. I like the "softer" sound of the 456 tape. To answer your question though, tape isn't going anywhere. How can it? Don't belive that industry hype about digital taking over and being the wave of the future. Thats whats wrong with music, it's all about the bottomline now. Their sales pitch is always, "Keep cost down, digital recording is faster, spend less, get more". Or something like that. My man runs a Guitar Center in the Bay area. He told me they don't make much of any money off anything except software sales - which is why they push digital recording/software so hard on they're customers. Think about it, after the software interface is designed.. the only cost is updates on errors that users find and the CD/DVD + packaging costs. They're overhead is extremely low compared to hardware developers, and they're profits are like 500% higher. Likewise, the whole outboard trend is out of fuc-ing control too. You got cats damn near building consoles from the outside in. Like backwords. The plus side is lots of sound options, rather then being constricted to one desk. It's a preference thing, but I think the uniform sound of mixing an LP through one desk w/ minimal outboard yields the best results. Look at Willie Mitchell and the Al Green stuff. He used an MCI 428 desk, MCI JH16 2" machine, (2) Pultec EQP1A's, an LA2A, and a RCA DX77. More or less, that was his entire setup. To wrap this all up, 2" just has a vibe that can't be fronted on. All these 1's and 0's got the world going crazy. Take it back to the essence.

5th May 2006	#30
GL Respect Due Lives for gear Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Wally World, AR Posts: 523	I can only speak on 2" tape, but my understanding is that Quantegy has a German distibutor that is actively building different formats/sizes of tape. They quoted me $250 for a reel of 499. $195 for 456 (which I prefer to print to). I agree you can hit 499 hotter, but that doesn't always translate very well. I like the "softer" sound of the 456 tape. To answer your question though, tape isn't going anywhere. How can it? Don't belive that industry hype about digital taking over and being the wave of the future. Thats whats wrong with music, it's all about the bottomline now. Their sales pitch is always, "Keep cost down, digital recording is faster, spend less, get more". Or something like that. My man runs a Guitar Center in the Bay area. He told me they don't make much of any money off anything except software sales - which is why they push digital recording/software so hard on they're customers. Think about it, after the software interface is designed.. the only cost is updates on errors that users find and the CD/DVD + packaging costs. They're overhead is extremely low compared to hardware developers, and they're profits are like 500% higher. Likewise, the whole outboard trend is out of fuc-ing control too. You got cats damn near building consoles from the outside in. Like backwords. The plus side is lots of sound options, rather then being constricted to one desk. It's a preference thing, but I think the uniform sound of mixing an LP through one desk w/ minimal outboard yields the best results. Look at Willie Mitchell and the Al Green stuff. He used an MCI 428 desk, MCI JH16 2" machine, (2) Pultec EQP1A's, an LA2A, and a RCA DX77. More or less, that was his entire setup. To wrap this all up, 2" just has a vibe that can't be fronted on. All these 1's and 0's got the world going crazy. Take it back to the essence.