CHAPTER 11
Tape Replay
The Return of Tape
When I was writing the first edition of Small Signal Audio Design in 2009, and indeed the second edition in 2015, it never occurred to me to include the technology of magnetic tape. It was gone and showed no signs of coming back. However, there were several vintage multi-track tape recorders displayed at the Paris AES Convention in June 2016, and reel-to-reel tape machines are now (2019) enjoying a revival. Perhaps that was inevitable after the vinyl revival, but few people predicted that cassette tapes would also come back to haunt us, and now they have. [1] Quite suddenly, there is a need for new tape machines to play back old formats. I would have bet a lot of money that the one format which would ...
