Mike Spitz of ATR Services, Inc. -- a company whose "raison d'etre" was servicing, re-manufacturing and otherwise keeping alive the ATR-100 Series Recorder by Ampex now has a new mission -- providing mastering tape for those machines and others like them. Company owner and president Mike Spitz took some time to chat with Gearwire about tape.

Patrick Ogle: Tell me about what you are producing. You do 1, 2 and 1/2 inch tape. What seems to be the most popular so far?

Mike Spitz: We manufacture 1/4", 1/2", 1" and 2" ATR Master Tape (AMT). 1/2" and 2" are the most popular widths but we have good activity with all widths. 1/4 inch has been picking up lately as well.

What led you to start making tape? What trend did you see happening that made you think there was a market?

Analog sound tracking and mixing was experiencing growth in 2005 when Quantegy and BASF closed their tape plants.

The only profitable tape made by Quantegy and BASF were analog audio tapes. However their plant size was simply too big to just continue making analog tape.

This left all analog users no choice but to record digital. I am the world's biggest proponent of analog music recording and I was "stupid" enough to put my wallet where my mouth is.

Manufacturing tape by all counts is extremely difficult and expensive. It took nearly three years get our tape to market. The theory of the process is relatively simple. The process itself is whopping difficult. The fact that I was striving for improved levels of magnetic performance added additional strain and expense to our technical efforts.

Is there any difference between what you are producing and the old BASF tape?

Many!

A lot of bands seem to be recording and then dumping for the mix to software. Have you seen this trend at all?

This has been a popular trend since the late 1990's. It is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. Bouncing off analog is a treatment but not a cure to make digital files sound something like a song. It certainly is more effective then adding another plug-in that is supposed to be a tape emulator. Why do we emulate when the real exists?

The good news is that younger bands are increasingly recording analog. Going analog means that you prepare, make decisions, play your best and tend to capitalize on capturing the moment. It is an evolved human experience compared with 'wanking' day after day at another LCD screen.

What are the costs?

In general the cost of recording analog has higher up-front expense than digital but after you have paid the up-front cost the analog recording method is far more economical and durable over the years. If a song it is not worth recording using tape, it is not worth releasing either.

Digital recording carries a heavily loaded rear end cost if one tries to make it sound okay and adequately backs up all of the files.

Our 2" tape cost less than similar tape was in 1976 if you take into account inflation and the dollar's value in general.

Thank God the best of the electrically recorded music era was done to tape. Can you imagine finding rare 1962 Muddy Waters SCSI drive or DAT, DASH, X80, DTRS, bit split ADAT tape, etc. They wouldn't even make good landfills.

An analog recording path is analogous to handling the real (as opposed to virtual) work of the artist. A sampled file is not analogous to real.

Anything else you want to mention about your tape? specs. etc?

I wish to thank our customers for keeping the faith during the development and our recent start-up. We have been slammed with orders and we have been back-ordered since day one. We are making incremental improvements to our process during production and our customers are noticing our efforts.

I may seem anti-digital but that is not at all true. Digital computer technology is great for my CAD-CAM work and very handy for our accounting system. It beats the slide rule and adding machine for these types of repetitious and boring chores. The point I am making is that digital and computer technology never did replace tape for music recording.

Music Breathes, Tape Breathes.