Please let me begin by acknowledging that there are many tape hobbyists active today. There are also many audiophiles.
But if we are defining an audiophile as someone who demands the best possible quality playback, then we might want to explore the state-of-the-art in analog tape.
Scrape flutter has been around since the dawn of analog tape. While it's easily detected and quantified with the appropriate instrumentation, many have argued (for almost fifty years!) that it's essentially inaudible in music recordings. Nothing to worry about, they say.
But is this actually the case?
I would say that relatively few people have ever experienced what an analog tape recording (and its subsequent playback) can sound like without scrape flutter.
One could rightly say that we make a big deal of scrape flutter at ATAE. And always have. We often needle the record labels and their mastering engineers who work with analog tape today, asking them why they are using high scrape flutter reproducers for the playback of important master tapes.
All that hard work to master the very best quality re-issues possible, and yet none of them are using ATAE reproducers for the original master tape playback?
We almost never get a reply to that question. Only silence.
It could be because most people do not really understand what scrape flutter is.
Or, what it does to the audio.
Or, where scrape flutter comes from.
The audio reviewer Jonathan Valin, from the Absolute Sound, recently wrote a review of a DS Audio optical phono cartridge. In that review, Jonathan reminisces about the old Decca London cartridge, nostalgically describing how the Decca's novel architecture eliminated a common source of distortion originating from the cantilever assembly found in almost any other cartridge.
Importantly, he wrote about what happens to the sound when that very familiar distortion is absent.
As I read that review from Jonathan, I kept thinking, wow, this subject of what happens when you remove cantilever haze is nearly perfectly analogous to removing the scrape flutter distortion seen in analog tape!
But if we are defining an audiophile as someone who demands the best possible quality playback, then we might want to explore the state-of-the-art in analog tape.
Scrape flutter has been around since the dawn of analog tape. While it's easily detected and quantified with the appropriate instrumentation, many have argued (for almost fifty years!) that it's essentially inaudible in music recordings. Nothing to worry about, they say.
But is this actually the case?
I would say that relatively few people have ever experienced what an analog tape recording (and its subsequent playback) can sound like without scrape flutter.
One could rightly say that we make a big deal of scrape flutter at ATAE. And always have. We often needle the record labels and their mastering engineers who work with analog tape today, asking them why they are using high scrape flutter reproducers for the playback of important master tapes.
All that hard work to master the very best quality re-issues possible, and yet none of them are using ATAE reproducers for the original master tape playback?
We almost never get a reply to that question. Only silence.
It could be because most people do not really understand what scrape flutter is.
Or, what it does to the audio.
Or, where scrape flutter comes from.
The audio reviewer Jonathan Valin, from the Absolute Sound, recently wrote a review of a DS Audio optical phono cartridge. In that review, Jonathan reminisces about the old Decca London cartridge, nostalgically describing how the Decca's novel architecture eliminated a common source of distortion originating from the cantilever assembly found in almost any other cartridge.
Importantly, he wrote about what happens to the sound when that very familiar distortion is absent.
As I read that review from Jonathan, I kept thinking, wow, this subject of what happens when you remove cantilever haze is nearly perfectly analogous to removing the scrape flutter distortion seen in analog tape!