There's no doubt that digital music formats offer a convenient way to listen to lots of music on the move. Factor in on-demand streaming services and you don't even have to worry about running out of storage space on your portable device. But even though digitized music reigns supreme, demand for analog formats like vinyl is on the rise, with US sales in 2015 up 30 percent on the previous year. Austria's Horch House says that when it comes to analog, you can't beat reel-to-reel tape and has announced its intention to develop a new consumer reel-to-reel player.
Horch House was founded with one goal in mind, to bring analog master tape audio quality to music lovers around the world. Master tapes, the blueprint from which subsequent pressings are made, offer listeners access to the original studio or concert recording as edited, mixed and arranged by the engineers. The company has a number of recordings from labels like Warner, Sony and Universal available on audiophile-grade vinyl or in high resolution digital formats, but it also sells reel-to-reel tapes.
"Audio tape is the only format that can record and play back pure, natural sound in its whole and original state," says Horch House. "Every other format requires some form of interference with the original audio signal. Audio tape is therefore the only format which allows the listener to hear a recording exactly the way the original artist and producer intended it to sound, before it was altered to fit on a vinyl record, sampled for a CD or squashed down to MP3 size."
Many homes in the 1950s may well have had a reel-to-reel player as the living room hi-fi centerpiece, but advances in portable music devices and digital recording and playback a few decades later relegated the reel-to-reel to the realms of yesterday's technology. If you want to dip into the reel-to-reel pond today, you'd be pretty hard pushed to find a new player to satisfy your appetite for pure analog goodness. In fact, the company reckons that new machines just aren't manufactured anymore.
Horch House aims to rectify this and announced last week that it intends to develop a brand new consumer reel-to-reel machine, and "will be working closely with some of the industry's foremost experts in order to deliver the most accomplished outcome possible." Details are scant at the moment, but the Project R2R team is reported to already be hard at work on a prototype to demonstrate at Munich's High-End Show in May.
Source: Horch House
An issue with magnetic tape is 'print through', whereby preceding or successive layers of tape wound round the reel transfer magnetic data via onto other layers. This could possibly be limited or eliminated by better quality tape, perhaps.
As for getting 'master tape' quality though, any pre-recorded tape that the consumer is likely to get is going to be, at the very purest, be a 'copy of a copy', but more likely many generations of copy away from the original studio master. And unlike digital, analogue recordings invariably suffer the further they are from the master tapes. Digital remastering can clean up the signal, of course, but my personal opinion is that such recordings can sound compressed and a bit clinical- compare an analogue-mastered analogue recorded Led Zep album to the remastered versions- some of the life and dynamics seem to have been lost.
I can see this product finding a home amongst audiophiles with a pre-existing reel-to-reel collection, as well as possibly home recording studios (as long as they are happy with just two channels, or want to do a lot of editing). I can't see it making waves amongst a younger generation used to digital- except maybe as a retro toy.
Still, it's given me an idea for fleecing cashed-up retro-dorks: I'm going to launch a crowd-funded reintroduction of the medieval hand-cart and promote it as a 'purists alternative' to cars.
Sure, you can probably fool the bearded hipster crowd who bought into LPs last year and are looking for the next really cool thing to impress the Object of their Desires...but for me, a 38 year veteran of radio and television production...Revox, Studer and Ampex have all made better decks already...these guys don't stand a chance.
Why aren't we focusing on the future of sound? i.e. Given the advent of 3d-printing technologies, new nano materials, lasers, and the discovery that DNA can hold information; I'm surprised we're not using quartz memory crystals yet, or a similar cartridge form that can hold Terabytes of data. Can you imagine listening to an ultra-HD digital master, with all of the tracks available to switch between/remix at will, with a read process that does no harm to the medium...and the medium is impervious to the elements and time?
Holographic sound!
With a good quality deck, tape and storage, one can have a very decent audio, and the look of the big reels turning can be pleasant as well. I'm glad I've kept my 1/2 track Revox.
Today's digital audio is all about bytes and convenience and have a kind of antiseptic quality that can be perceived as clean and pure, but the intangible pleasantness of records and tape will always be there to the ones who recognize the difference. It's no wonder the formats are making a comeback.