Many times, those who pine for the good old days never actually lived through them. Case in point, recording to analog tape. Analog tape recorders might as well be magical artifacts. It’s amazing that they even work at all, let alone that anybody actually used them. Let’s look at the real process of analog recording:

Before you can even begin recording, you must first clean the tape heads, rollers, capstan, and guides. Next you must demagnetize the heads, capstan, and guides. Then comes head alignment. Don’t forget to adjust the speed using test tones printed on tape. If you are very good at this process, you can get it done in about 45 minutes to an hour. The reality is, most people didn’t do this, or at least didn’t do it often enough. My mentor spent many years setting up and maintaining tape decks in the Washington D.C. area, because engineers were either too lazy or didn’t know how to do it themselves.

Oh yeah, don’t forget about record levels and such… there’s another 20-30 minutes gone.

Then there is the medium itself. Analog tape. It’s inconvenient. It’s heavy. It’s expensive. Right now, a reel of two inch tape costs $289.

And then there’s editing. I’ve never edited analog tape. However, I’ve been working on a tape restoration project, and have had to re-do a number of tape splices. So I’ve been introduced to razor blades and sticky tape. Let me say this, I’ll take Pro Tools any day over analog editing.

All this is to say, there is a reason digital recording took off, even though the early digital technology was terrible. People stuck with it because it was so much easier to work with than analog. Analog tape, when properly set up, has a certain sound that is magical. But is that sound worth the time and expense of dealing with tape? No. And with creative use of plug ins, one can recreate that analog sound quite faithfully.