Professional Tape Recorder Specs

[Dave Labrecque]

Could well be, Dave, that experience looks like genius from down here. Maybe I just didn't get enough of it. Also, reel-to-reel tape was expensive for poor musicians, and degraded after the first print. So, we used it sparingly. Maybe too sparingly for the inevitable apparent-genius to develop. I actually kind of like that explanation.

[Dave Labrecque]

The Geoff Emerick book is a fun read. One of the tidbits is that he wasn't an old-dog - but a kid. EMI had a sort of a promotion path that (obviously) nurtured engineers.

I enjoyed the audiobook. By "old dogs," I guess I meant something more like "old-schoolers." The guys who more or less invented the process, necessity being the mother of invention and all.

Geoff was bringing his show to Tucson when he passed a few years back. I guy I know from the ad biz there was promoting the event. Alas...

[Carl G.]

I enjoyed the audiobook. By "old dogs," I guess I meant something more like "old-schoolers." The guys who more or less invented the process, necessity being the mother of invention and all.

Geoff was bringing his show to Tucson when he passed a few years back. I guy I know from the ad biz there was promoting the event. Alas...

Reminds me of the very last commercial ever produced for James Brown's last tour that I produced on Dec 23rd, 2006. Two days later I was driving on Christmas day, turned on the radio to hear my spot.... but instead on the news was the news of his death. The promoter asked me for a "bereavement discount".

Geoff is one guy I really wish I could have met. I was the production engineer for a San Francisco rock station throughout the 70's.... using 2 tracks, full tracks, lots of carts, tons of outboard gear, and splicing blocks on every deck with razor blades. Reverse echo, varispeed, filtering, splicing, multi-track production, etc... for me was a real hands on experience with the excitement of creating something new. I really appreciate the experimental ingenuity Geoff brought to music production... unafraid to try new things with the equipment he had. I'm glad his production stories are preserved (his video interviews are fascinating).

[Dave Labrecque]

Reminds me of the very last commercial ever produced for James Brown's last tour that I produced on Dec 23rd, 2006. Two days later I was driving on Christmas day, turned on the radio to hear my spot.... but instead on the news was the news of his death. The promoter asked me for a "bereavement discount".

Geoff is one guy I really wish I could have met. I was the production engineer for a San Francisco rock station throughout the 70's.... using 2 tracks, full tracks, lots of carts, tons of outboard gear, and splicing blocks on every deck with razor blades. Reverse echo, varispeed, filtering, splicing, multi-track production, etc... for me was a real hands on experience with the excitement of creating something new. I really appreciate the experimental ingenuity Geoff brought to music production... unafraid to try new things with the equipment he had. I'm glad his production stories are preserved (his video interviews are fascinating).

Indeed.

Wasn't he the guy who hooked up a large speaker cab to act a s microphone to record bass? Crazy, man.

I remember the old days in radio production, though I didn't start till '83. Never had a multi-track to work with till toward the end of my last gig. Till then it was usually cutting it live to half-track Otari with a music bed cued on the turntable and some carts with sound effects ready to trigger. Not unlike on-air jocking, right? That's all we had. Sometimes we'd get fancy with a razor blade, but not usually.

[Tim Miskimon]

My biggest gripe about digital recording is the playback from one software version to the next becomes more and more impossible as the years pass by.
It doesn't matter what software you used - playing back a recording to remix years later is a big pain in the ass.
In a lot of cases Operating Systems keep you from using previous software, plugins, hard drives, motherboards, etc.
And it just keeps getting worse as time goes on.
It's a constant moving target.

20 years down the road no one is going to even know how to play any of this stuff back because no one keeps notes anymore like was done back in the analog days.
It's sad that you can get a 60-year-old analog tape to playback but not a 20-year-old digital recording.
You can find a working tape machine from the 70s to playback tapes but not a 20-year-old Windows computer with all the right hardware and software to play back a digital recording.

Saw has been pretty good of being backwards compatible but that's not enough.
I have hundreds of multi-track recordings on old IDE drives and Windows 10 lots of time won't read them.
Microsoft created a nightmare for us recording guys when they put all those administrator permission schemes into their software and it's getting worse with each new version of Windows.
Sometimes without warning when I put a hard drive from another machine into my windows 10 machine it won't let me read it - it blocks me out saying "I don't have permission to read the disk".*
Put the drive back into an old XP machine and they work.
In order to get them all to play back right I would need a wall of computers Windows 3.1, 95, 98, Millenium, NT 2000, XP, Windows 7, Windows 10.
The machines would have to have all the original versions of plugins to playback the sessions properly - what an impossible and impractical bunch of bull****!

In the old analog days, you put the tape on the right machine and play it back.
No, it wasn't perfect but at least the machines had a set of standards they went by.
All I can say is make sure to keep backing up every time a new generation of hardware and software becomes the next new thing.
Afterwards make sure the stuff plays back on the new machine.

I've been trying to mix a back log of original songs that goes back to the mid 70s.
About 15 years ago I transferred all the multi-track analog stuff to digital.
Unfortunately, those transfers were done in SawPro and on IDE drives.
Last year I transferred the stuff on the IDE drives to SATA Drives.
The old SAWPro stuff got reset in Saw Studio and then more recently to Saw Studio 64 bit.
The whole thing is very time consuming.
At this point I am doing all my recording in Saw Studio 64 bit, and I'd like to stay right here.
The only reason I moved from XP to Windows 7 to Windows 10 was machine failure.
I'm still doing most of my processing with my old analog processors.
I've grown tired of re-buying plugins every time a machine and/or OS goes south or obsolete on me.

Yeah, digital has so many pluses and the results are wonderful but somewhere along the line we need a set of standards, so our life's work does get lost forever with no way to retrieve it.

[cgrafx]

Working on older digital projects is no different than working on old analog projects.

I think your romanticizing the old analog days. There was no project file for an analog mix, just audio that may have various stages of intermediate mix downs, but none of what happened on the mixing console or intermediate processing is stored anywhere other than possible notes, or magically available to do a remix.

Assuming you can find a working multi-track deck that can playback an analog tape, you'd still be working with whatever audio files were recorded on the tape.

In the digital space you'd be exactly in the same spot (the project file is not the audio, just the instructions about what to do with them).

20 years from now, there won't be any problem reading Audio Wave Files, or for that matter reading older non-wave digital audio format and with the digital project files, there is at least the possibility of converting that to a current working DAW.

[jmh]

20 years from now, there won't be any problem reading Audio Wave Files, or for that matter reading older non-wave digital audio format and with the digital project files, there is at least the possibility of converting that to a current working DAW.

About 25 years ago we got an upgrade for our AS400, which would no longer support legacy 8" floppies. My job prior to the upgrade was to transfer our 15~20 year old employee payroll files (on the floppies) which needed to be archived for 75 years. About a third of the records were unreadable, and many of the surviving files were dependent on the other missing records. Oh well...

[Dave Labrecque]

A tape-to-DAW comparison assumes a false equivalence.

One needs to see the comparison as not between a reel of tape and a DAW, but rather as between a reel of tape and a collection of sync'd audio files. All the tape can do is play back the tracks. Which you can do with the audio files, too, on any DAW as far into the future as you wish to go (within reason . Not so much for the reel of tape.

However, DAWs bring a whole world of additional functionality--which, yes, does require that a whole new slew of details be paid attention to. The solution there for many is to print your tracks into new sound files and move those files to new archival media as time goes by (a process which becomes faster and faster over time). But I digress. All those additional capabilities are well beyond what you can do with a reel of tape. So, not germane to the comparison.

Yes, storage media change over time. Again, it's not that that matters. It's the files. Again, those can be moved into new media. A reel of tape -- not so much.

However, if had your heart set on using the tape/tape-machine-to-DAW/computer-machine comparison and really need to use that IDE drive in order to work on your old session, then, yes, you would have to maintain an old compatible computer system. Just as you would have to maintain an old reel-to-reel machine to play your reel of tape. Of course, the DAW computer would likely be way less pricey than your tape machine.

I find the digital approach's requirement to periodically move my files to modern media way worth it compared to storing (and, possibly, baking) old tapes along with maintaining an old tape machine--for archival material that I may or many not ever need to resurrect.

YMMV.

[Carl G.]

A tape-to-DAW comparison assumes a false equivalence.

One needs to see the comparison as not between a reel of tape and a DAW, but rather as between a reel of tape and a collection of sync'd audio files.

YMMV.

Yes, one requires complex dexterity while flashing razor blades with samurai-sword accuracy, the other requires one simple finger plopped on a mouse.

To Tim's point, I wonder how many of us still have DATS to 'bring back' the 'audio files' and Session DATA archived from earlier versions of SAW?

And I like your wisdom: What detail really needs to be archived anyway? And IF so, (if I may elaborate) we always have various methods in SawStudio for archiving original files, used excerpts of files, Mixed Effects of files, Session Data, and even Session Trims, along with Exports with and without effects. (Thank Bob, for well thought out software).

[Dave Labrecque]

Yes, one requires complex dexterity while flashing razor blades with samurai-sword accuracy, the other requires one simple finger plopped on a mouse.

To Tim's point, I wonder how many of us still have DATS to 'bring back' the 'audio files' and Session DATA archived from earlier versions of SAW?

And I like your wisdom: What detail really needs to be archived anyway? And IF so, (if I may elaborate) we always have various methods in SawStudio for archiving original files, used excerpts of files, Mixed Effects of files, Session Data, and even Session Trims, along with Exports with and without effects. (Thank Bob, for well thought out software).

I still have a DAT deck in storage. Whether or not it would work upon thawing remains an unknown. I was never all too confident with DAT playback. Seemed that the format was just not that robust in terms of the playback machines.