How high are tape prices at the moment?
I still have a few new or almost new 1/2" Quantegy 456 which I don`t need since my r2r broke down and I might consider selling them.

Well,

if tape isn,t gone quite yet... it will be in the future. It's just not gonna make it.
But we have even more horrid obsticles to hurdle in the future.
It was bad enough when all of our nice, full range, dynamic analog recordings were being smashed onto a cd at 16/44.1 but soon the majority of purchased music will be done online...
16/44.1 and then further compressed into a very firm turd.
We are moving into an era of extreme decline of quality in exchange for laziness.
This is not helping the hopeful rejuvination of the tape industry.
It will come down to dollars kids. The time will come when if you want to record on 2" your gonna pay $1000 a reel just to have your product shat on in the end.

Sorry... I'm gonna go drink now

japmn wrote:Well,

if tape isn,t gone quite yet... it will be in the future. It's just not gonna make it.
But we have even more horrid obsticles to hurdle in the future.
It was bad enough when all of our nice, full range, dynamic analog recordings were being smashed onto a cd at 16/44.1 but soon the majority of purchased music will be done online...
16/44.1 and then further compressed into a very firm turd.
We are moving into an era of extreme decline of quality in exchange for laziness.
This is not helping the hopeful rejuvination of the tape industry.
It will come down to dollars kids. The time will come when if you want to record on 2" your gonna pay $1000 a reel just to have your product shat on in the end.

Sorry... I'm gonna go drink now

Whoa, relax man.

Have you heard of DSD yet? Not to be tooo optomistic, but I am pretty sold on this as the next generation. You can now buy 24 tracks of DSD platform with A/Ds & D/As plus mastering capabilities for $57K. That's about the price of an A820-24, right?

If you haven't heard SACD yet, you're missing out. Yeah, there are still issues to be worked out in the way of standardized long term storage. In the meantime I think DVD-R/RW formats would suffice.

The future is looking a little brighter, but we'll have to give up some of our attachment to big metal pieces of gear with knobs all over 'em.

I would suspect that the truth is somewhere in between. I haven't heard SACD yet, although I'm sure it sounds glorious. But the sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of people are not audiophile geeks like us. Most people can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD quality sound, and even a lot of musicians I know were surprised when I told them that I sold my DAT because I just didn't like the way it sounded. (Yup, they think 16-bit 44.1 with crappy converters sounds good.) Remember, most people listen to music either off the radio (with a bandwdith of what, 11kHz?) in the car, or on lousy computer speakers.
Having said that, there always will be sound nerds. Audiophiles with deep pockets are already buying up SACD and DVD-audio discs. But what are they mostly buying? Remixed, remastered, re-releases of all their old favorite records. It's the late 80's all over again, when everything got re-released on CD. Maybe our best hope is that computer storage and bandwidth is able to keep up with the requirements of the new formats, and the plebs end up ditching .MP3 for something better sounding.

hello everyone... well, i've been out on the road for the past couple of months and quite out of the loop on the state of analog recording...

is quantigy making any tape?? there were rumors when i left that they would be back in production??

is ATR the only game in town?? (http://www.atrmagnetics.com/)

i'm running quite low on tape!!! hope everyone hasn't run out!!

best,
jeremy

The assets of Q were purchased by Discount Tape of GA for $5M and some change on Friday the 25th of March after being approved by the bankruptcy court judge.

I don't know if that means the lines are running though.

Link

There's also been talk that the former Emtec lines will also be producing tape, but I don't have a link for that.

man... so, everything is still up in the air i guess... nuts... just what we all expected... the huge run on tape, and then the three month lull where we all slowly run through all of it...

guess we will all just have to wait and see! longer!

My studio just recieved our new catalogue from Studio Spares (Uk company), and in the tape section the only notice they give is in the form of a sticker over the description for GP9 saying:

"Quantegy may have a possible temporary supply problem"

No mention of there not being anymore tape. And they list stock for all other kinds of tape, 456 included.
Maybe like you say someone will just take it over and sell it as the same stuff. Quantegy was obviously a very big company and maybe tape just didn't make a big enough profit for them to carry it on. But it will make a profit so maybe someone else would be interested.
I still ATR is the one to watch, sounds like it could be really cool plus I emailed them and they said they SHOULD have UK distribution too.

I talked to Quantegy 2 days ago. They said they should have new tape ready in about 4-6 weeks.
They said that 2-4 weeks ago as well.

I visited ATR Services three days ago. Mike Spitz said that they are making good progress setting up their facility. He suspects that the first reel of tape should roll out around August. This is later than he planned I think, but they keep running into unforseen things along the way. Luckily, Mike has a team of three consultants helping him out, the youngest of which is apparently 69 years old.

Setting up this kind of operation is really diffficult, though I think in the end it'll be worth the wait. No word on the price though. I'm guessing it will be double the previous price of new tape.

I wonder how the Electrical stock is holding out...