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In Reply to: RE: Okay, it's been a month .... posted by Dave Pogue on November 18, 2014 at 07:05:13
It's pretty much an extinct format.
ljb
Follow Ups:
Ok granted...high end cassette has a small but dedicated loyal following. The majority of cassette users however are dumpster diving broke hipsters that don't have a dime to their name. I agree with you that if that's the main demographic the format appeals to, it doesn't have much of a future.
Reel to reel is quite a different animal. It still has a studio following as evidenced by the products offered by ATR Services and RMGI. Also, the home hobbyist is something of a force to be reckoned with as there still are quite a few of them. It's just too bad that folks running quarter inch stereo on 7" and 10" Teacs, Akais, Revoxes, and Sonys *ARE* the forgotten ones of vintage audio.
Go spend some time looking at current and sold listings on Ebay for so-called "consumer grade" tapes, decks, and accessories and then come back here and tell me there's no market for it.
Meanwhile, here's a "new" component in my system. Look at it closely....at a casual glance you might not see it.
At this point I think the studios are the only serious force in keeping reel tape alive. They are the driving market for providing any kind of new production media. Watching Quantegy(Ampex) take over production for from Scotch-3M, having the US market nearly to themselves and still going out of business (twice, I think) has been pretty disappointing. Even the progression in Europe from BASF to EMTEC to RMGI to Pyral shows that the market is a pretty tough one.
The two most interesting things I've seen in the last several years has been the start-ups of ATR tape products and the Tape Project offerings. That either of these ever got off the ground is, to me, pretty phenomenal.
As far as 1/4 track consumer-grade stuff, I think that's as you described high-end cassette: "a small but dedicated loyal following". True, there's a lot of vigorous activity on Ebay, but it's really just trading a finite and slowly shrinking set of hardware & software. Vinyl has the advantage of new manufacture hardware, new releases and some level of affordability. Not so with tape.
ljb
Extinction sucks.
But since eBay still has many thousands of open reel (not to mention 8-track) listings every day, there's clearly at least a modicum of interest.
Just not here :-)
I don't know about cassette or 8-track as I have no interest there, but I believe the majority of those, like myself, who are into reel-to-reel have moved our attention to the tapeheads.net site. There are a couple of gentlemen there who are current repair techs and another gentlemen formerly of a major tape manufacturer who have been more than generous in sharing their knowledge and assistance. A lot of activity there.
ljb
And in addition to Tapeheads there is the Yahoo reel-to-reel site and specialized sites like NakTalk. What gets me is that there are plenty of tape-related threads posted on other Audio Asylum forums that invariably generate bunches of responses and yet here on Tape Trail, next to nothing.
I gather you gave up on finding that 8-track. You were kidding? Really? I'd never have guessed.
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