Analogue Productions First R2R Tapes

Mike

Mike

Audioshark
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Sarasota, FL
Ready your ears for something special! From Acoustic Sounds, Inc., the world leader in audiophile music sales, comes the highest quality analog reel-to-reel tape album reissues — Analogue Productions Ultra Tape! Twelve masterpiece titles are featured in this new reissue series, each a 15 ips, ¼-inch analog tape copy sourced from a copy of the original analog master tape. Transferred real-time, using an ATR-modified Ampex Tape Machine with flux magnetic heads. Each copy is housed in a custom slipcase cover.

The first two titles — Janis Ian's Breaking Silence and Ben Webster's Gentle Ben — are slated to be released before 2016 ends. Analogue Productions is the vinyl, SACD and now audio tape reissue label owned by Acoustic Sounds.

The remaining titles include: Rickie Lee Jones' It's like This / Hugh Masakela's Hope /Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances (the famous Turnabout recording) / Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Scheherazade (RCA Living Stereo) / Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Pines of Rome and Fountains of Rome (RCA Living Stereo) / Leopold Stokowski's Rhapsodies (RCA Living Stereo) / René Leibowitz and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra The Power of The Orchestra (RCA Living Stereo) / Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Lieutenant Kije and Stravinksy's Song of the Nightingale (RCA Living Stereo) / Abel /Steinberg - Beethoven Violin Sonata (Wilson Audio) / and Lowell Graham's Winds of War & Peace (Wilson Audio).

Each reissue copy is priced at $450. The entire series is available by subscription and subscribers will pay for 11 titles and receive the 12th one free!

Acoustic Sounds has enlisted Gus Skinas, of the Super Audio Center in Boulder, Colo., to handle the tape transfers, which are made using the Ampex Tape Machines in the control room at Blue Heaven Studios, here in Salina.

For more than a year, at every trade show and on more and more phone calls and emails, our customers have hammered away with the same request: “When are you going to start selling tape?!”

You spoke, we listened. We know tape's advantages: greater dynamic range, especially at frequency extremes; minimal signal processing; and unsurpassed richness and realism — it's the closest to hearing the master tape. You're going to be blown away when you experience playback of our Ultra Tape reissues from Analogue Productions! Order your subscription today!

Karen Krecklow
Subscriptions Manager

[email protected]




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Great news! Considering that many of these albums are two reelers, the price is not bad. I know where my next $5K is going. Larry
 
I ordered Janis Ian - Breaking Silence, Hugh Masakela - Hope and Fritz Reiner - Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
 
Odyssey said:
Mike, thanks for the heads up on this series of R2R tapes. I didn't realize that you can pick and choose from the offerings. Wasn't the Tape Project subscription only?
Click to expand...

Nope. You could buy those one off too, but it was difficult due to supply.


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Mike said:
Nope. You could buy those one off too, but it was difficult due to supply.
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Click to expand...

Tape Project started by offering subscriptions (I was number 45) at a good discount. They added individual purchases, as Mike says, but those were secondary to the subscribers. So they had to do extra runs when they had enough time and there were sufficient numbers to justify the specific set up needed to do a small number. They also have quite elaborate cases and artwork as well as specially embossed reels with serial numbers that add to the complexity of production.

Larry

PS My guess is that AP will have a pretty good sense of the quantity of each tape they do initially do, based on the preorders and then add a few more so they will keep a small inventory of tapes available for sale. Because production of tapes is in very small numbers (the maximum run is determined by the number of machines you have - looks like 3 from the video Mike posted.) So they probably won't keep a big inventory, unlike vinyl, where the production requirements are much larger for a run, and the marginal cost of materials is not too high (not much more cost to do 1200 records versus 1000 records). With tape, there is a very high production cost, since everything is in real time plus quality control and the tape itself is expensive.
 
Great! Karen is hassling me to fulfil my next order so I will pad it with Hugh Masakela.

Not all the titles are compelling enough to want to subscribe to the set, but I will take a closer look and choose something more.

My last purchase was from Volker Lange and those tape transfers are awesome.
 
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