Audio Engineering: Know It All

Chapter 26. Tape Recording

26.1. Introduction

Magnetic recording underpins the business of music technology. For all its “glitz” and glamour, the music business, at its most basic, is concerned with one simple function: the recording of music signals onto tape or on disc for subsequent duplication and sale. Before the widespread advent of computer hardware, this technology was pretty well unique to the music industry. Not that this limitation did anything to thwart its proliferation—the cassette player was the second most commonplace piece of technology after the light bulb! Nowadays, with the massive expansion in data-recording products, audio—in the form of digital audio—is just another form of data to be recorded in formats and distributed ...