Modern Recording Techniques, Seventh Edition

Chapter 5. The Analog Tape Recorder

From its inception in Germany in the late 1920s and its American introduction by Jack Mullin in 1945 (Figure 5.1), the analog tape recorder (or ATR) had steadily increased in quality and universal acceptance to the point that professional and personal studios had totally relied upon magnetic media for the storage of analog sound onto reels of tape. With the dawning of the project studio and computer-based DAWs, the use of two-channel and multitrack ATRs has steadily dwindled to the point where no new analog tape machine models are currently being manufactured. In short, recording to analog tape has steadily become a high-cost, future-retro, “specialty” process for getting a certain sound. This being said, the ...