Tape vs Digital Part 1

A tape machine was the only way music was recorded for about 40 years. Then, in the 1990s, computer technology made digital audio recording possible. There was a period when both technologies were in use, but the advantages of digital were overwhelming. The cost of a digital recording system, using commodity computers, was less than a tenth the cost of a multitrack tape machine. This vastly expanded professional-quality recording availability.

Digital recording has many advantages. But recording to magnetic tape has never disappeared entirely. In this first part of a two-part series, I talk about the practical aspects of tape recording.

In part 2, I will contrast the two technologies, and offer my opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of tape and digital.

I will return to the last episode of Basic Electronics for Recording Engineers after this short series.

Thanks for listening, commenting, and subscribing. I can always be reached at dwfearn@dwfearn.com. I enjoy reading  your reactions, suggestions for future episodes, and hearing your personal stories.

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Transcript

118                        Tape vs Digital    Part 1                                    June 8, 2026

I’m Doug Fearn and this is My Take on Music Recording

 We will get back to the Basic Electronics series soon. This is the first of a two-part series of episodes contrasting tape recording and digital recording.

Practical music recording goes back around 150 years. Since then, we went from acoustic recording, where the sound itself made the recording on a wax cylinder, to the shellac flat disk, to electrical recording, and then to recording to magnetic tape.

As soon as computers were fast enough, we made the transition from analog recording to digital. And that’s where we are now.

Every advancement improved the sound of music recording.

And every advancement left behind some aspects of the previous technology that many people were not happy to see abandoned.

What I am talking about is the original capture of music, mostly in a recording studio.

What I want to do is contrast the sound and the practical aspects of recording to tape, to the current generation of digital recording. I have covered the history of those technologies in previous episodes, so I won’t go into a lot of that detail.

Let’s start with tape, which was not practical until just after World War II. There were tape machines going back to the late 1930s, and machines that recorded to a steel wire before that, but it wasn’t until the Ampex company developed a truly high-fidelity tape machine in 1948 that tape recording started to replace cutting discs as the professional recording medium. The first machines were mono. There was only experimental stereo back then.

Multitrack machines evolved over the years. Other manufacturers developed their own multitrack machines. At the peak of tape recording in the studio, there were machines that recorded 24 tracks on 2-inch-wide tape. And two 24-track machines could be synchronized to provide 46 tracks of audio.

Let’s look at the technology. The earliest machines used one-quarter-inch tape for one or two tracks. The concept was simple: the audio was fed into a recording head, which was an electromagnet that varied the amount of magnetism in step with the audio level. That was imposed on a moving strip of tape.

The playback head generated a tiny electrical signal from the magnetized tape, which was amplified to a useable level.

Seems simple, and in a basic sense, it is. But the magnetic tape-recording process does not work without a lot of manipulation. We have to do a lot of that to get it to sound acceptable.

The primary problem is the tape itself. It is a plastic base that has been coated with iron oxide – rust, which gives some tape its brown color. The iron oxide particles can’t be just any old rust dust. They need to have a specific mixture and alloy. They need to be a very precise size. Those things, and more, determine how linear the response the tape will have to the magnetization provided by the record head. Manufacturing tape is an art, and it’s not just in getting the oxide right. It has to be coated onto the plastic base with precision. It has to adhere to the plastic over a long time period – decades, ideally. It has to maintain the precise magnetization it received while it was recording the music, so it sounds as close to the original as possible.

Few companies were capable of making high-quality tape. In the U.S., it was the 3M company that pioneered the process. In Europe, BASF and Agfa also made premium tape. All of those were primarily chemical companies and they knew how to make the plastic tape, the iron oxide, and how to coat the tape with precision.

Later, other companies, like Ampex, started making their own tape.

And, not surprisingly, the tape from different manufacturers all sounded a bit different. The companies had to compromise on their formulations to obtain a particular goal. There are conflicting attributes, like output level, noise level, and dynamic range that have to be weighed against each other. Every tape brand had a different set of criteria that entered into how the tape was formulated.

Ideally, the audio level and the degree of magnetization should track each other perfectly. But they never do. That’s also true in other active electronic components, like transistors and vacuum tubes. In electronics, bias is used to keep the audio in the most linear part of the amplification curve. It places the audio at an ideal range that matches the best performance of the tube or transistor.

The same technique is used with tape, and it, too, is called bias.

In an analog audio amplifier stage, there is really only one bias level that is optimum. But every tape formulation needs a different level of bias to sound its best.

And, as always, it’s a compromise. The flattest frequency response, the lowest distortion and the character of the distortion, and the lowest level of tape background noise, all occur at different bias levels.

As precise as the manufacturing process was, there were always slight differences from one reel of tape to the next. Recording engineers back then became experts in optimizing the tape machine adjustments to get the best performance from the tape.

Adjusting the tape bias was a big one, but there are also equalization adjustments on every track of a tape machine that have to be set properly. This required time to align the machine, and good studios did that for every reel of tape they used.

In addition to those electronic adjustments, there are mechanical adjustments that are critical. The most important was the head azimuth. That’s the geometry between the head “gap,” where the magnetic flux is focused, and the tape passing by. The azimuth must be right or you lose high frequency response. Even worse, on a multitrack tape machine, the phase error between tracks can cause just what you would expect: on stereo tracks, partial cancellation of particular frequencies.

Before you do anything, you need a reference tape, recorded with precision. That tape is used to set all the adjustments on the tape machine playback. Machine manufacturers, and later, independent laboratories, created these alignment tapes, one at a time. The tape had tones at specific frequencies to adjust head azimuth and to set the playback azimuth. And then the record adjustments are made to match the aligned playback.

In a series of three episodes from April 2020, I talk more about these technical aspects. For this discussion, I just want to make sure you are aware of the many things that can happen with a machine that is not properly aligned.

A major shortcoming of tape is its high noise level. Under the best circumstances, the signal to noise ratio is about 60dB. That means that noise is going to be audible except during the loudest parts of the music. There was a constant battle against noise during the tape era.

Better tape formulations helped. They allowed a higher recording level, which reduced the noise. But the big breakthrough came from Ray Dolby in the 1960s with his ingenious noise reduction system.

Without going into detail, Dolby A noise reduction encoded the audio recording in a way that when it was decoded on playback, the noise was reduced by 15dB. That was a big improvement. Dolby A required precise alignment of the record and playback electronics. Any misalignment could result in a degradation of the sound. Studios who maintained their tape machines with precision benefited from Dobly A, but studios who had poor maintenance rejected Dolby A because they “didn’t like the sound of it.”

Done properly, Dolby A made high-track-count sessions practical, and virtually all top-end studios used Dolby A.

A later version, called Dolby SR, reduced the noise even more, to where it was at least as quiet as 16-bit digital.

Tape machine technology advanced so that by the end of the 1980s, recording to tape sounded great.

But it was never perfect. There was always some difference between the original and the playback.

A lot of the problem arose because of the pre-emphasis that needed to be used to reduce the gross noise of tape. In this scheme, the high frequencies are boosted during record, and attenuated on playback. Since the most annoying noise is at the higher audio frequencies, this reduced the noise by at least 20dB. A similar preemphasis scheme is used for vinyl discs and analog FM broadcasting.

Pre-emphasis isn’t without its drawbacks, however. The highs are boosted on a curve that peaked at around 20dB at 20kHz. That meant that the tape overloaded much sooner at high frequencies than at lower frequencies. Things like cymbal crashes, vocal sibilance, and many instruments like piano, sounded harsh and distorted. To avoid that, the recording level had to be reduced. That, of course, increased the noise level. More compromises.

Those are just a few of the challenges of recording to tape.

On the plus side, many people like the audio distortion of the tape-recording process. Most tape machines and tape could have, at best, about 5% total harmonic distortion on level peaks. That was orders of magnitude worse than the other electronics.

But the distortion was mostly second harmonic, an octave above the original sound, and that added a musically-acceptable sound to tape. So the distortion was not as bad as the measurements would suggest. In fact, it is one of things that many people love about the sound of tape.

Tape recording is an electro-mechanical process. On the mechanical side, the machine has to move the tape at a precise and steady speed. Any variation in that speed will be heard as “wow” or “flutter.” Wow is a slow change in pitch, over a period of a second or more. Flutter is a more rapid change in pitch.

As a simple example of the effect of wow and flutter, think of a Leslie cabinet. The organ, or other sound, changes in pitch slightly, due to the Doppler effect of the rotating speakers and baffles. In a tape machine, even the slightest variation in the tape speed produces a similar effect. It isn’t an enhancement like a Leslie cabinet. It sounds bad.

Wow and flutter are most notable on things like piano. Actually, any instrument or voice that has a sustained note of more than a few hundred milliseconds will sound off-pitch due to wow and flutter.

It’s not just the motor that controls the tape speed that cause the problem, but anything in the tape path can cause wow and flutter. The tape has to pass around several guides along its path from the supply reel to the takeup reel. Some machines have stationary guides; others have rotating guides. Many tape machines had a combination of both.

As the bearings deteriorate over time, the guides impose more friction on the tape, and that can cause all sorts of problems in the sound. Fixed guides gradually wear down due to the passage of the tape. So do the heads, all three of them: erase, record, and playback. Tape is very abrasive, like super-fine sandpaper.

The three heads in a tape machine are gradually ground down and their performance drops. When the wear gets to a certain point, the heads either have to be replaced, or ground back down to a smooth surface. That grinding, called “lapping,” can only be done a couple of times before the head has to be replaced.

The bearings in the motors wear out, too.

Tape machines need a lot of repair and maintenance to sound acceptable.

Another factor is the quality of the tape manufacturing. Tape is made in very wide bands, which are cut down to the required width in a process called slitting. Any variation in the width of the tape can cause problems. Sometimes it was so bad you could actually see the tape moving up and down as it crossed the heads. More often, poor slitting resulted in wow and flutter. In any case, poorly slit tape was unusable.

The tape machine can also cause a problem similar to poorly-slit tape. Anything in the tape path that is not perfectly aligned can affect how the tape flows past the heads.

An extreme example occurred at a session I was doing at a major studio with an early 24-track tape machine. During an overdub, the machine lost control of the tape and over the course of a couple of seconds, it lifted up and off of the heads. That resulted in erasure of the tape across every track below the one in record. That destroyed the entire session. It was not customary to create a back up to multitrack sessions on a second tape machine. We had to re-record the project from the beginning – at a different studio.

Another variable is the consistency of the size of the iron oxide particles on the tape. There is a limit to how precisely that can be maintained. On any reel of tape, there is always a constantly changing output level and frequency response of the recorded audio. With good tape, the variations are very minor. But they are always there. And that imparts a kind of roughness to the sound that wasn’t in the audio going into a tape machine.

The easiest way to hear that is to put a pure sine wave tone into the tape machine. To be a true sine wave, it has to come from an analog oscillator. Digitally-derived sine waves are not pure enough.

With an oscillator frequency of around 1kHz, listen to the input to the tape machine so you know what the pure tone sounds like. Then record the tone and play it back. What you will hear is a distinct change in the character of the sine wave tone. It is no longer pure and pristine. I hear it as roughness. On a meter, you can often see it as a constantly changing level. It’s less than a dB, but you can hear it easily.

Another problem with tape has to do with that bias that is required to make tape sound as good as it can. This is a sine wave at a constant frequency above our hearing range, typically around 50kHz. Notch filters in the tape machine playback electronics filter this out, so it should have no effect on the music. But there can be non-linear mixing of the audio and the bias. The result is audible artifacts in the reproduced sound.

An easy way to hear this is to feed a pure sine wave tone into the tape machine. Start at around 1kHz and slowly sweep the frequency upwards to 20kHz or even beyond. You will hear a second tone that also sweeps up. It is usually lower in frequency than the original tone, but it could be higher. Or both. The higher the recording level, and the higher the audio frequency, the more of these artifacts will be heard.

Those spurious tones have no musical relationship to the original tone, so they sound discordant.

This is caused by the mixing of the oscillator tone with the bias. That creates sum and difference frequencies. The sum frequencies are way above our hearing range, but the difference frequencies are audible. They tend to fall in our hearing’s most sensitive range, around 3kHz.

Some amount of these spurious artifacts is inevitable. They can be reduced somewhat by lowering the level of the audio going into the tape machine.

It’s easiest to hear on pure sine wave tones, but those spurious frequencies are also there in the music. You might not notice them, but they do affect the sound of the music.

In the 1950s, Les Paul had Ampex build a special 8-track tape machine using 1-inch-wide tape. He was able to make hit records with just two performers, himself and his wife, Mary Ford. Nothing like it had ever been heard before.

But there is a problem when you try to overdub on a tape machine. Since the machines have separate record and playback heads, each optimized for its task, there is a slight delay between when listening to the playback while overdubbing a new part on an empty track. The overdubbed track will be out of sync with the previous tracks.

The solution was to temporarily use the record head as a playback head during the overdub. That solution works great. However, the audio quality suffers when the record head is used for playback. Not a problem for an overdub, but it does become an issue when tracks are “bounced.”

Bouncing was a term used back in the tape era to describe the process of mixing several tracks together and then recording them onto a new track. An example might be the drums, which were often recorded on multiple tracks. But tape machines have a finite number of tracks. To free up additional tracks, the multiple drum tracks were mixed together and that mix recorded on the new track. In some cases, the entire rhythm section was reduced to one carefully mixed new track. You had to get the mix right because the source tracks would be erased and replaced with new overdubs.

Bouncing has a couple of problems. For one, you must use the record head for playback of the tracks to be combined, which reduces the audio quality. And the second problem is that the new combined track you are recording cannot be adjacent to any of the tracks being combined. For example, on an 8-track machine, let’s say the drums are on tracks 1 through 5. You cannot bounce them to track 6. Only tracks 7 or 8 can be used.

Why? It’s because as precise as the record heads are designed, there is always some minor spillover from one track into those on either side of it. The higher the audio frequency, the worse the “bleed” becomes. During normal recording, that’s not a major problem.

But during bouncing, the new combined track can have lots of nasty high-frequency distortion. In many cases, there will actually be feedback. That makes it impossible to bounce to an adjacent track.

Obviously, the higher the track count of the machine, the less of a problem this will be. But with 4- and 8-track machines, it can become a complex problem that requires a lot of pre-planning of the track layout. Imagine if you are going to bounce all the drum tracks down to one track, and then record a bunch of background vocals and do the same thing. It becomes a chess game where you need to have a multi-move strategy. Otherwise, you could back yourself into a corner where there was no solution to bouncing the tracks.

The audio performance of the “edge” tracks was usually not as good as the other tracks Engineers back then knew that any voice or instrument that would be featured in the mix should not be placed on tracks 1 or 8. Or 1 or 16. Or 1 or 24, depending on the tape machine.

Anything recorded in stereo should be on adjacent tracks. Maybe you could get away with a pair with one other track in between. But the farther the left and right tracks were from each other, the greater the phase difference. That is due to imperfections in the manufacturing of the record and playback heads, as well as dependent on the quality of the tape manufacturing.

Today, we think nothing of sending out a digital multitrack, or sub-mix, to another studio for an overdub. Incorporating that track into the master multitrack recording is easy: just find the sync point and it will stay perfectly in sync through the duration of the song.

That’s not possible with tape. If you tried to do that, it would drift out of sync over the course of the song. It doesn’t take much offset to ruin the feel of the music. The two machines would only stay acceptably in-sync for less than a minute. Sometimes only seconds.

You could only overdub on the original master tape.

Even the best tape machines ran at slightly different speeds at the beginning of the reel, compared to the end of the reel. That was not usually a problem, but if you wanted to create a composite take from, say, take 1 at the beginning of the reel, and take 6 at the end of the reel, there could be enough of a speed change to be audible as a pitch change.

There is a lot to consider when recording to tape.

 In the 1950s engineers came up with the idea of “punching in.” It’s the same concept as what we do today in digital, where a performance is good up to a point in the song, but then the vocalist or musician makes a mistake, or isn’t happy with his or her performance, and wants to pick up at a certain point. Some songs have hundreds of punch-ins.

That works pretty well on a tape machine. But there is one problem. As the tape moves across the heads, a track is first erased, then recorded. At the moment of the punch, the tape is erased and then around 100 milliseconds later, the new audio is recorded.

If the punch is very tight, say between words in a vocal performance, you have to anticipate the punch by a short amount of time, while avoiding clipping the previous word. That’s a problem that does not exist in digital recording. It took me a long time to change the way I punched in a track after I made the transition to digital recording. The muscle memory from thousands of punch-ins during the tape era had to be replaced with a new, easier technique for digital.

Actually, I rarely do punch-ins anymore, since all the music I record is with artists I am producing. I prefer a performance that is complete from the start of a song to the end. Keeping multiple takes is standard with digital recording, so it is simple to save editing decisions until later. Still, I almost always pick one performance and stay with it for the entire song.

Back in the tape era, there never seemed to be enough tracks. Even with 24 tracks, sometimes all of them were filled when it was decided to do one more overdub. Perhaps it was a guitar solo. It was common to use a track where nothing was happening during the solo, like the lead vocal track. That worked fine, but the engineer had to be very precise with the punch-in and punch-out. Otherwise, you could erase part of the vocal. That could be stressful. And in the mix, it would require several changes, like a new level, panning, eq, or echo sends. That’s something we don’t have to worry about with digital recording.

Another drawback of recording to tape is that every time you make a copy of a recording to another tape machine, you lose quality. A lot of quality. The most obvious loss is the doubling of the tape noise. That also applies to distortion, wow and flutter, tape graininess, and bias artifacts. The high frequencies tend to become muffled, too.

In the best scenario, the mix is a second generation. But what if you had to do a lot of bouncing? Best case, those tracks would be a third generation.

Keeping the number of tape generations to a minimum was a challenge in the tape era.

Noise was a constant battle. It was necessary to keep the level as high as possible when recording to tape. But that had to be weighed against the increase in distortion at higher recording levels, especially with sounds that had a lot of important content above 10kHz.

Some engineers used some high-end boost while recording, and a corresponding roll-off during the mixing session. That was like another layer of pre-emphasis, and it tended to increase those high-frequency problems in exchange for a bit less noise.

Also, you better do all your eq on a track while recording, especially any high boost. Boosting the highs during the mix will bring up the tape noise.

Managing all those compromises was necessary to get the best possible sound out of tape.

Tape storage was important, too. For one thing, reels of 2-inch tape take up a lot of shelf space, so studios had to devote entire rooms to tape storage. And that space had to be climate-controlled, to reduce the inevitable deterioration of the tape over time. Humidity had to be low, 50% maximum. Otherwise, mold could grow on the tape.

And the tape had to be kept separated from any permanent magnets or electromagnets. Loudspeakers and dynamic microphones both have strong magnets in them. So do headphones. Motors, relays, and solenoids all create a magnetic field in their vicinity. Even a mobile phone has magnets in it. Engineers had to consider where they put a reel of tape, even if only for an instant.

One time an engineer at my studio put an RCA 44 ribbon mic down on the top of the box for a master 2-track mix tape. I walked in and saw that and went into panic mode. Sure enough, when we played the tape, there was a fading out of the music, along with a huge increase in noise, with every revolution of the tape reel. We had no choice but to bring the client back in to mix that side of the album again. Needless to say, that engineer, and all my other engineers, never made a mistake like that again.

Tape is supplied on 10-inch reels. That’s about 2400 feet of tape. At 15 inches per second, that’s around 30 minutes of recording time. If you record at 30 ips, the time is only 15 minutes.

And that time must include the tones that are necessary at the start of every reel. The usual sequence of tones was, first, a 1kHz sine wave. That was used to set the playback level adjustment on the tape machine. It was also the reference level for the equalization adjustments.

Next was the Dolby Tone, if Dolby A or SR noise reduction was used. This is a distinctive tone that was used to set the alignment of the external Dolby equipment, both record and playback. Without that Dolby Tone, it was nearly impossible to properly decode that tape.

The tone had to last long enough to set the calibration on each track of the multitrack. If it took 10 seconds to set each track, that would be 4 minutes of tone. In actual practice, that time was cut down to half of that or less, which meant backing up the tape to set the alignment of every track.

After that came 10kHz, which was used to adjust the playback head azimuth. Those tones were mandatory for any multitrack tape that might go to another studio for overdubs or mixing.

The 10kHz tone was also used to set the playback high-frequency equalization.

And last would be a tone for setting the low frequency equalization. That was usually 100Hz, but it could be 50Hz with some machines.

By the time all the tones were recorded, it might use 5 to 8 minutes. That’s a significant portion of the recording time, especially at 30 ips. The only way around this is to record shorter duration tones, which saves tape but increases alignment time.

Of course, when the tape ran out, that was the end of the recording. If you were recording a song that was several minutes long, you might have to change the reel with nearly that song length of tape being unused.

Tape is expensive, so usually you could not save every take. Well, if it was a well-funded major label project, there might not be as much pressure to minimize tape cost. But usually, it meant that you kept going over previous takes until you got one everyone liked. At most, you would keep only two or three takes.

Changing reels takes time. Good engineers could do that in a few minutes. That is a major loss of flow in a session. Digital has the edge here. You can keep every take, every partial take, you never run out of tracks, and you never have to stop to change tape reels.

Tape machines up until the 1970s did not have a time readout. If the machine had that feature, it was reasonably accurate for a series of rewinds and plays, but eventually it became too far off, and it would need to be reset.

Before there were tape counters, in order to return to the beginning of a take, the engineer hit the rewind button and listened. The tape was lifted off the heads, to reduce head wear and to prevent the high-speed audio from blasting you out of your seat (and possibly causing damage to your speakers). With the tape spaced about a quarter inch from the heads, the level was low, and had no high-frequency content at all. But you could tell when you reached the quiet part before the recording began.

But how could you be sure you stopped the tape at the beginning of the correct song or take? You could not be sure, and any distraction during rewind might cause you to play the wrong take. To prevent this, every take was “slated.” That’s a term from film production where a small chalkboard was held in front of the camera lens with the take number, and other information. Consoles were designed to provide the audio equivalent of that. When you pressed the Slate button, the control room talkback mic was routed to every output of the console. You stated the necessary information, which included the song title and the take number.

We can still do that today with digital recording, but it’s largely unnecessary since we can have text markers on the DAW screen with that information, and counters accurate down to a hundredth of a second or better. And we can see the waveform display on the computer screen.

One nice feature built into many consoles was a “slate tone.” When you pushed the slate button, not only was your voice recorded, but underneath was a low-level, low frequency tone, usually around 50Hz. You could hear it on playback, but it just sounded like background AC hum.

But when the tape machine was in rewind or fast forward, the tone would be raised well into the mid-frequency audio range. If you had to go back three takes, for example, you would hear three short beeps to help you determine where you were.

By the 1980s, most tape machines had “auto-locators,” which use the tape counter to return the machine to the selected time and stop. It was a huge time saver. Most of those had multiple memories, so you could mark critical parts of the song for rapid access.

You could buy tape on metal reels, but that was expensive. Most studios bought quarter-inch tape in the form of “pancakes.” That’s just the tape wound on a plastic hub, but no reel. This saved a lot of money. Wider tape was usually supplied on a metal reel.

So what do you do with the pancake? You could just load it on the machine as if there was a reel, and tape from some manufacturers, and some tape machines, would run the pancake form flawlessly. But usually, a bottom flange was used. The flange was one-half of the reel. Tape on a reel had top and bottom flanges, bolted together. But with a pancake, you could simply put a lower flange on the tape machine and then carefully put the tape pancake on top of that. Going the right way, of course. The bottom flange helped keep the tape from unraveling during editing, so it was a good idea.

By the way, the term “flanging” referred to the old way of creating that moving phase-difference effect. The engineer would put his thumb on the top flange while the tape was playing. With just the right pressure, you could slow the tape just enough to cause a varying phase difference between one track on the tape and another duplicate copy of the track recorded on another machine.

Note that running tape without the top flange only works with some types of tape and only on some tape machines. Back then, I never used the top flange with Agfa tape on a Studer quarter-inch machine.

Eliminating the flanges also eliminated another potential problem: the tape scraping against the flange a bit with each revolution, if the flange was not perfectly flat. That would slow the tape very slightly at each scrape, but worse, it could actually modulate the audio at a frequency equivalent to the audible frequency of the squeak.

And that brings up another point: operating tape machines produce some audible noise in the room. Good machines are very quiet, about the same noise level as a quiet computer with slow speed fans. The noise increased considerably during fast forward and rewind. For that reason, many studios put the tape machines in a separate, nearby room. That required another engineer – the tape op.

When the tape was put back in the box for storage, you put just the pancake in the box. No flanges.

The natural inclination when starting a new reel of tape is to put it on the left spindle of the machine, the supply side. But there’s a better way. And that is to put the new reel on the right spindle, the takeup side, and then rewind it all back onto an empty reel, or just a flange, on the left.

Why? All tape machines wind tape much more precisely at normal playback speed, as opposed to fast forward or rewind speeds. Rewinding a tape often leaves an uneven surface across the reel. That makes the tape edge easy to damage. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to result in damage over time. But playing the tape all the way to the end keeps the tape pack more even.

That meant that when you pulled out the tape to work on it again, you would have to rewind it first.

Storing tape this way was called, “tails out,” and that would be noted on the track sheet attached to the box.

Tape machines improved in every way over the four decades they were in use. By the last generation, they had become precision machines that handled tape very gently. But older machines were rough on the tape, especially when operated by someone who didn’t understand how to minimize tape damage.

In rewind, for example, all machines would automatically shut off the motors when the tape ran out. But that was an inelegant way to treat the machine or the tape. When the tape ran out a high speed, the reel would continue to spin for several seconds, which battered the end of the tape. Bits of tape could flay off and scatter around the room. And that was noisy. Not a professional way to run a tape machine.

On professional machines, you could hit the fast-forward button to slow the tape. Or the rewind button when in fast forward. That would decelerate the tape. Good engineers would use the fast-forward and rewind buttons alternately every time the tape was moving at high speed. This kept the noise down and made it easier to find the right location on the tape.

Pressing stop while in rewind or fast-forward was the mark of a totally inexperienced engineer. On most machines, that applied the brakes, in order to stop the tape quickly. That was very hard on the tape. You could actually stretch the tape by doing that. I have even seen the tape break. In any case, the tape is ruined, and probably many hours or days of work was destroyed. Think of the “stop” button as an emergency brake when in rewind or fast-forward, to be used only in dangerous situations.

Tape machines can be dangerous. Keep people away from them at all times. I had an engineer who got too close to a 16-track, 2-inch machine and got his long hair stuck between the capstan motor shaft and the pressure roller. It yanked his head down in an instant. His face was cut by the metal pieces on the tape deck and it took several minutes to unwind his trapped hair while he was in extreme pain. After that, he was much more careful and starting putting his hair in a bun when he was working.

The evolution of tape machine technology effectively ended by 1990, when it became obvious that the future was digital recording. The major manufacturers of tape machines, Ampex, Scully, 3M, Studer, and MCI, all ceased production. Some of them went out of business.

That’s a shame because improved technology was constantly raising the quality of the sound of tape recording. Machines had many new features that made the workflow quicker. Tape, too, was improving all the time. It is interesting, and somewhat sad, to think of what might have been developed had progress not stopped.

Still, the drawbacks of tape made the medium no longer viable. Digital improved the recording process in just about every way.

Some people have always preferred the sound of tape. There are many appealing things about that sound that we have lost. Sure, you can get a plugin to emulate the sound of tape, but it’s never the same. Today, most people use a real or virtual tape machine as an effect. That’s legitimate, if it helps you achieve the sound you want.

For me, I do not miss tape very much. The constant time and money it took to keep tape machines running at peak performance was a pain. And tape was a huge expense.

I’ve done some projects recently that used a tape transfer as part of the sound we were trying to achieve. There was something comforting about hearing that sound again, but it was mostly nostalgia for me. The defects of the tape-recording process reenforced my appreciation of digital recording.

In the next episode of this two-part discussion, I focus on digital recording. And I contrast the sound, convenience, expense, and longevity of tape and digital.

Thanks for listening. If you have comments, send them to me at dwfearn@dwfearn.com

This is My Take on Music Recording. I’m Doug Fearn. See you next time.