Why Tape?

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: Most people have not had the experience of hearing studio master tapes. Many formats have been introduced with the promise of bringing master tape sound into the home listening room.

Yeah, right.

We don’t expect that this tape project will replace any of your other favorite formats, so we see no need to dwell on the drawbacks of any other format. Suffice it to say that we don’t offer an “analog-like” listening experience. We are offering a chance to have in your own listening room an actual analog listening experience as close to the original master tape as practical.  

Q: OK...but open reel tape in 2007? This is a truly insane idea. What made you decide to do it?

Dan: I had been putting on this show (Vacuum State of the Art Conference) for several years, and my distraction with show administration meant that I always had an ill prepared demo room for my own Bottlehead products. So I decided for VSAC 2003 that we needed a really good sounding, dialed in display. I was talking with Paul and we wound up deciding on tape playback. Paul made a few master copies just for the show. My bud Dave Dintenfass of Full Track Productions put together an Ampex 350-2 for us. Paul and his cohort “Geets” Romo came up from San Francisco, and we played tapes, in addition to LP and hot-rodded digital front ends.  

Paul: I expected the tapes to sound good of course, and I expected they would sound better than the LP and digital sources. But I was shocked at just how much better they did sound. And I shouldn’t have been surprised; I’ve been working with tape masters for 30 plus years.  

Dan: Best Sound of Show from three reviewers at that show, and a Best Sound Of Show at the first RMAF (with headphones only, no less!) with tape playback, and now best sound of show at CES 2007 from many of the reviewers at TAS seems to support our approach.

So why are we doing this?

To share that experience with our subscribers.

Q: Are you saying this is better than any other format?  

A: We find the sound of 15ips half track analog tape to be distinct from the sound of any other format. As Mike Spitz of ATR Service Corp. says, “Nothing sounds like tape.” 

A: Our duplication process begins with the actual analog master tape. From that we make analog running masters on one inch two-track format. The one inch tape format transfer results in a extremely low loss of information, which we consider more like 1/2 generation than one full generation. These running masters are copied in real time to a bank of finely tweaked Ampex ATR-100 decks, yielding a "1-1/2 generation" copy. You just aren't going to get any closer to the original master, short of buying a record label or two.

Q: What format do you use?  

A: We have chosen 15ips, 1/4" half track stereo tape using the IEC playback curve as the format. This format is vastly different from the pre-recorded tapes of yesterday, good as they were. In fact it was the master tape format of choice for many many legendary recordings, and is the preferred format of many record producers today. Why IEC eq? Take a look here.

A: Glad you asked! As we embarked on this project we became acutely aware of the lack of suitable playback machines out there. Not that there aren’t thousands in the field. But many of the machines that lived in studios or broadcast facilities have been worked to death. And many of the home machines fall short of the performance capabilities of the tapes themselves. So we have decided to offer a tape machine modification service tailored to the quality level of these tapes.

A: We made an agreement among ourselves from the start that the music must move us, or we won’t put it out. In fact we spend as much time looking for great titles as we do making sure our technical quality is as good as we can get. And we want to hear what you have to say about new titles. You can posts title suggestions in our Tape Project Forum Suggestion Box

A: Tape is very expensive, nearly $50 per reel these days. And there are two reels in each album. Now add in the license fees, production labor, facility costs, custom packaging, custom reels and you get an idea of our costs. And you probably get an inkling that we sure aren't doing this to get rich.

There is another interesting way to look at this as well. In two ebay auctions that we tracked in October of 2007, an original Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus LP sold for $262.57, and an original Bill Evans - Waltz For Debby LP sold for $464.99. By their descriptions these are LPs with average wear and tear. For $200 each you can get our noise free "1-1/2 generation" master tape dubs if you subscribe to the Tape Project for 2007 - seems like a no-brainer...