Tale of the Tape:
Audiophiles Bemoan
The End of the Reel
As Quantegy Shuts Plant,
Purists Snap Up Supply;
NASA Feels the Crunch
By ETHAN SMITH and SARAH MCBRIDE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 12, 2005; Page A1
Jeff Tweedy, leader of the rock group Wilco, prefers to record music on
reel-to-reel tape rather than on the digital equipment that has overtaken
the music industry. Purists like him think it confers a warmth and richness
to recordings that a computer cannot.
But last Friday, Mr. Tweedy hit a snag as he prepared for a session in
Wilco's Chicago studio space: Nobody could find any of the
professional-grade audio tape the band is accustomed to using. "I was under
the impression that there was a shortage of tape in Chicago," Mr. Tweedy
says.
What he didn't yet realize was that the shortage is global. Quantegy Inc.,
which may be the last company in the world still manufacturing the
high-quality tape, abruptly shut down its Opelika, Ala., plant on Dec. 31,
leaving audiophiles in the lurch.
Quantegy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday and hopes a
restructuring will eventually revive its operations. But its future is
uncertain, inasmuch as demand also is dwindling for its videotape.
The news has set off a frantic scramble in the music industry as producers
and studios seek to secure as much Quantegy tape as possible. By the middle
of last week, most suppliers around the country had sold out their entire
stocks of reel-to-reel audio tape.
The supply that remained came at prices rapidly escalating above the usual
$140-per-reel wholesale price of Quantegy 2-inch tape. Walter Sear, a
prominent New York studio owner, quickly snapped up 60 or 70 reels, some at
prices that had ballooned by as much as 40%. "We'll have to change our
approach to life without tape," Mr. Sear says.
Quantegy is hearing from customers all over the world trying to secure the
professional-grade tape. A Japanese musician e-mailed from Tokyo, eager to
get more for a recording session. Richard Lindenmuth, Quantegy's president
and chief executive, says he'll try to help. Some customers are trying to
organize their own bailouts of his company. Andrew Kautz, president of the
Society of Professional Audio Recording Services, called Mr. Lindenmuth
Friday hoping to get a one-time special order, a request Mr. Lindenmuth is
considering.
The crunch reaches far beyond the recording industry. The National
Aeronautics and Space Administration uses Quantegy tape on its space
shuttles to record information ranging from pressure to temperature. This
week NASA has been trying to buy 20 reels from Quantegy.
Even Hollywood is affected. Some die-hard moviemakers believe voices sound
better recorded on analog tape. In making "Spider-Man 2" and the Harry
Potter movies, digital recording technology has taken the front seat, but
backups of dialogue were recorded on reels of Quantegy tape. Engineers are
also worried about how long digital recordings will last.
Tape was used to record most music after World War II. In the heyday of tape
recording, it was common for rock bands with big recording budgets to run
through hundreds of reels of tape in making just one album.
But over the past decade, the tape has been rapidly outmoded by cheaper,
more convenient computer-based digital recording. People in the music
industry say that as few as 5% of albums are recorded and mixed using audio
tape.
The purists have a romantic attachment to the taping process. "It's a much
more musical medium than digital could ever dream of being," says Joe
Gastwirt, a mastering engineer who has worked with the Grateful Dead and
others. "It actually does something to the music."
Most of the industry gravitated to the cheaper digital technique, however,
transforming tape from a commodity to a boutique item. That changeover has
wiped out a once-hardy field of competitors. Quantegy was founded shortly
after World War II by John Herbert Orr, a former Army major who called the
company Orradio Industries. Ampex Corp., a maker of recording equipment,
bought Orradio in 1959 and renamed it Ampex Magnetic Tape.
Over the years, Quantegy went head-to-head with various competitors,
including European brands like Emtec Magnetics and BASF. But as the market
began to fall off, Ampex decided to get out of the tape business in 1995,
and spun off Quantegy that year. As computer technology overtook the
recording industry in the late 1990s, Quantegy's competitors bailed out.
Some tapes are manufactured in China, but audio professionals generally
don't consider them to be of consistently high quality.
Quantegy's audiotape business in 2004 was still profitable, accounting for
$6 million of the company's $30 million in sales. But the company fell into
trouble because of other obligations and when Quantegy lost one of its major
videotape customers in July, it suffered a cash crunch. By year's end, it
couldn't meet payroll and sent its employees home. Mr. Lindenmuth believes
an injection of $10 million would save the company, and is hoping a Chapter
11 reorganization will give him time to find investors.
When Wilco's Mr. Tweedy found himself in a bind, he telephoned Steve Albini,
a Chicago producer and studio owner who is known for his work with Nirvana
and the Pixies. Mr. Albini's Electrical Audio Recording is one of the last
major studios in the country to rely exclusively on audiotape.
Mr. Albini had been stockpiling tape for more than a year, worried that the
end of manufacturing was near. But when Quantegy closed its doors, he
redoubled his efforts to secure as much as possible. Working through normal
sources, he tracked down around 65 reels, enough to make about 10 albums.
He also began "looking in the weeds," as he puts it. He tracked down
contacts who buy odd lots of electronic equipment on the salvage market.
Through one, Mr. Albini hit the mother lode: nearly 2,000 reels of 2-inch
magnetic tape, enough to fill a small warehouse. Mr. Albini bought 100 reels
and is trying to keep the supplier's name and whereabouts to himself. He
says he doesn't want to see a better-funded competitor move in on the
remaining stock.
Mr. Albini estimates he now has a year's worth of tape, or about 500 reels,
on hand. So when Mr. Tweedy called last Friday, Mr. Albini volunteered two
reels of tape -- as "a professional courtesy." But, he says, "I don't want
to go into business supplying tape to people."
Looking ahead to a tape-starved future, Mr. Tweedy has a fallback: The band
has an archive of around 100 reels of tape it has used in recording its
various albums. By splicing out and saving the final version of each song,
he figures they can maintain the archive and also generate a supply of tapes
that can be recycled for future recording sessions.
Still, Mr. Tweedy jokes, if the tape scarcity continues, even some of the
archived recordings might become expendable. "I'm just fearful that all the
master tapes at the loft would be worth more if they were blank," he says. |
