It astounds and amuses me in equal parts that today’s hipsters are willing to spend so much money on yesterday’s technology. Revox have released a B77 MK3 for €13403.36. Come on Edison, you are missing out on the action!
I’m about to go round to a friend’s to sort out the hum on their new record Deck and pre amp.
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be…
Some time ago I had to borrow a tape machine to digitise some old tape recordings. It was a one-shot operation, because the brown matter flaked off the tapes and flew around the studio after passing the capstan. So I’ve digitised the things with 32 bits and 96k without any great adjustments, to make any level and eq controls later.
The tapes ran exactly only once before auto-destruction. The resulting digital copy was ok, though, given ghost magnetation and flutter had been digitally corrected. So much about tapes. It’s good they are a thing of the past.
Old tapes should be baked to stabilise then before benign used.
Yes. Although baking did not prevent the brown matter from flaking off.
At the BBC In the early eighties, one of my jobs was running old programmes on 2" tape through the degausser for reuse.
Memorex 2" video tape was very prone to decay. It sweated a white powder that clogged the heads and the backing sometimes separated from the oxide as it went round one of the rollers which then collected in a little heap on the floor.
Honestly that’s pretty cheap for a good, studio quality reel to reel. The Otari MX5050MKIV I got off of a guy for $20 about a decade ago retailed for about $40,000 in the 90s when it was new, and those were on the lower end of professional machines - something solid and reliable you’d see in a radio station but nothing special.
If vanity stuff like this helps keep 1/4" heads available to help keep older, better, cheaper machines running then I guess I’m OK with it existing. At least there are actual, legitimate reasons for it to be expensive, unlike some things we’ve seen in recent years.
Revox are the consumer brand and the B77 is a consumer product. Studer is their grown-up professional company and it was clear that an A80 would outlive a A77 by many years, taking a lot of abuse. I had many a happy hour lining up Studer tape machines trying to get as flat a record / playback curve as possible, at least within the tight specifications of my employer. I still have the lineup tapes and records and carts but I doubt they would be of much use today!
A spent a little time earlier today drawing an icon for zynthian’s audio recorder. This is how far I got.
Yep, we used to sell good-condition Revox and similar machines in good working condition for $150 or less (often a lot less) at the record store where I worked in the 2000s, and even at those prices they would usually sit on the shelf for months.
If you have those calibration tapes and they’re in good condition (i.e. the 10k-or-whatever tone hasn’t been partially erased by stray gauss on the heads during use, which I assume has happened to every used calibration tape in existence) they’re actually worth a decent amount. For reference, a used MRL alignment tape can easily get a few hundred USD depending on the width, speed and other details (The most basic MRL tapes start around $160 and a new 2" tape costs over $1200 USD; used in good condition they go for about half the new price). You could probably get at least 40 euros each for yours as-is on eBay.
The Airwindows tape sims have gotten so good these days that I haven’t even turned on my Otari in over a year. I’ve never bothered to even take the MRL tape that came with it out of the box, sinc eI only use it to process digital recordings or record to tape and immediately dump to digital, so getting the play heads decently aligned to the record head by feeding test tones through it is good enough. The person I got it from got it free from a Berklee lab that only had it out for the last few years where they taught people to edit on tape, and the heads are basically new so with the amount I use it any uneven wear isn’t going to be an issue until sometime around 2075.
The audio equipment that aged well are tube amps. Even they will be obsolete soon and replaced with their AI models. I have just replaced caps, rusty pots and ground screws on my 50 year old hiwatt dr504 so it can go for another 50. I dought that anyone will use it after me.
Don’t underestimate the hipsters of the future. We have the technology to simulate audio chains to sufficient accuracy to pass blind test comparisons, even without machine learning. People don’t like being fooled and so they are willing to spend money to use equipment that they perceive to be more original and sound better. That perception is substantially influenced by social and psychological elements and the judgement on quality is almost always coloured by various bias that has little to do with what something actually sounds like or what we want from true quality. (You can read Robert M. Pirsig’s Lila for fun consideration of what “Quality” means.)
I spent a career in audio engineering, removing or reducing the imperfections in audio production and improving reliability and consistency and now our hipsters want vinyl, cassette, analogue, etc. I’ve even seen them marvel at the effect of electromotive interference. I have a garage full of old tat that some millennium would consider a treasure trove.
I am always interested in these perceptions. The vinyl obsession completely ignores what an appaling audio source a record is, but people do appreciate the many, many alterations that were made to try and extract something that approached decent quality. With noisy simplistic amplifiers fed by basic power supplies records developed a sound, that was tuned, to be pleasing to the human ear and familiarity is a key component to human experience. The anticipation of the stylus clunk and the early burst of static and surface noise, not to forget the pre echo of the over modulated outside grooves set the experience up. Adding in the perception of lowering the stylus, and activity that cannot be completed in any film without a shot of the operators tongue pensively held in the lips are as ritualistic as the sighs we inevitably produce as we perform our basic human functions.
There is a similar effect in the visual recording media. The resolution of film is very high. Kodak complacently believed as it had stock that exceeded the commercial stock by a couple of orders of magnitude derived from their rather more secretive activities from the military, and the demise when it came was almost instant as the efficiencies of digital post production on a shoot destroyed the entire production merry go round film involved. It lived on a little in high end post production ( commercials and some high end drama )because it was a highly developed production chain but even this quickly died once good telecine techniques had caught up with one specific characteristic. The ‘look’.
Because once again, film had some very specific limitations, which the human consumption had come to accept as part of the experience. Watch alien on a vhs of the time and it’s virtually impossible to see what is going on, because all the gorgeous detail in the black completely disappeared especially if there was any bright areas in the shot. Film was creatively used to maximize that sort of look. And it happened at the other end as well. The BMW commercial looked luxurious on film but rather pedestrian if shot on video even when transferred well ( well wyleu had to have had some skill once upon a time). The basic truth was film was associated with quality and a more involved experience than video and as it sold more cans of beans it carried on. Even when CCIR 601 video emerged, initially 8 bit in parallel on D type 25 pin connectors and then serial it quickly became apparent that 8 bits didn’t hack it, so it was moved to 10 bit. relatively easy for serial equipment but an absolute nightmare for the those that had wired for parallel (BBC video effects workshop we are looking at you). That did at least get it good enough that not only could digital video do clever lossless post production ( Boy in the Bubble by Paul Simon impossible to do without dissolving into noise on analog, but the 8 bit artifacts are there if you watch it on a decent monitor of the time and probably the first mainstream use of the Abekas A62 digital disc recorder).
Film just had a refined luxury look, but digital got there and film suffered the surpassed technical fate of the gaslight.
So we are not producing just an audio signal in the air, it’s the human experience we are trying to regenerate. Quite how that works in terms of context and whether or not we are indulging our sense of nostalgia or actually extracting more enjoyment from the experience is a moot point but one that a commercial world will not examine too carefully but simply satisfy consumer desire, but be aware there are those that delight in an experience and those that simply wish to claim their senses are more attuned than yours are. An artistically derived pecking order that is probably best recognised in the peculiar world of high end audio.
Just be aware of which side of that process you are on. The first is sustainable, the second might well have a rather intense series of rather debilitating moments of realisation.
I wonder if vinyl aficionados might well have such insight to look forward to.
Thank you Nurse, yes I will take the larger dose. . . . .
I don’t think is the nostalgia. It is more ritual of cleaning the record, lowering the stylus and hearing its clunk and finally dedicated the time to hear the whole record and not just a song.
I also believe that lack of dynamic range of records forced producers to spend more time on mixing and not just being lazy and simple make it loud as you can easily do on digital media.
After bringing down from loft my old Technics a-class amp, record player and records my kids that grow up listening digital music started to pay fortune for new records of their favourite artists and play it on record player.
Similar can be said for Kindle vs real book.
I am convinced it is more ritual. Ritual is what human like. We are emotional beings and like to imagine that there is something there that we can’t hear or see.
A very human characteristic. Indeed it can be positively terrifying. Nostalgia, which was originally defined as a medical condition, is, as you point out, not the correct term. I wonder if what little reverence still reserved from terrestrial TV is does to the increasingly complicated button dances one performs to actually get to the traditional channels.
A simple performed act to produce a reward.
I’m glad she was busy and we got indulged with these thoughts of yours!
Thank you so much, it really adds to what I’ve been reading and thinking for a long time, trying to reach objective conclusions around my (imaginary?) feeling of auditory fatigue after some hours listening to mp3 versus wav/flac, which paradoxically challenges my engineering notions of digital audio.
I’ve come to hypothesize that this may be primarily related to some overuse of the perceptual codecs filtering out normally masked audio details. I guess we don’t hear them, but we still feel them, and our brains miss them when they are absent… After all, there is an amazing amout of energy that we don’t hear but we feel from, for example, a bowed orchestral section playing live.
Very interesting point. I thought that it is clumsy UI department of major TV brands but maybe they just know what we like and design remotes on smart TVs to be as clumsy as possible to revive nostalgia.
We also learn to recognise the inherent characteristics of a mechanical process.
The breathtaking original piano sound of the Kurzweil keyboard,
now sounds recognisable and surpassed, althou some still swear by it, and there is the pleasure/ pain feedback element at work. The more we like or hate something the more we learn to characterise it .