As a long-time audio guy who believes in the tape medium, my eyes opened wide when I heard about The Tape Project. These are low-generation, real-time master-tape duplicates onto half-track, quarter-inch tapes at 38 cm/sec (15 inches per second). There was a company called Sound Ideas out of Seattle selling similarly-authentic tapes, same speed, same format, back in 1981 when I was a graduate student. They were (US) $50 each and I figured I could come up with that much monthly. My first tape was "The David Grisman Quintet," truly a gem. By the time I was ready for my next $50 installment, the company folded and I had just the one item from their catalogue.

     Now these guys show up at $200 per album by subscription, $329 if purchased individually they say. That sounds like a lot of money, but $200 in 2008 isn't all that expensive, really. It's not as much as $50 was in 1981. I don't think it's nearly as much as $17.95 was in 1958, and that bought a factory-duplicated, half-track 19 cm/sec (7½ inches per second). It's not as much as $16.95 or $12.95 or even $10.95 back then. Anybody who has filled a grocery cart or a gasoline tank should resonate with that.

     I have pilot friends who cut back on their flying complaining that aviation gasoline went from $3.50 to $5.50 a gallon so it's costing an extra $20 per hour to fly their airplanes. (At least jet engines stop whining when they're shut off.) The cheapest piece of junk flying at the airport is worth $20,000, about the same as a decent hifi rig. Just as it doesn't make sense not to fly $40,000 of machinery to save $20/hour of fuel expense, it doesn't make sense to forgo the best sound from $40,000 of hifi gear to save $200 per album on tape.

     At current prices for tape, royalties, packaging, and shipping, I don't think they're making a whole lotta money on this stuff. I believe in tape as an audiophile medium and so do they. If I want to get serious about music reproduction and hifi, then I believe tape is the audiophile medium for recorded music and, as long as the tapes sound terrific, I applaud this effort.

    

The Tape Product      My first tape came last week in a nice two-volume package the way one would package Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in a two-volume set. There is an outer box with two tape boxes inside made of nice material. In each box is a metal reel stamped with the album number and side (e.g. 001A and 001B) about half full of quarter-inch tape.      The tapes have translucent leader at both ends, see-though enough to invoke the auto-stop feature on my ReVox A77, so the tapes stop cleanly on rewind and play. (I "reverse-brake" my deck on rewind and fast-forward to spare my ReVox brakes any undue hardship.) They're packaged "tail-out," rewind before play, which is the storage direction I prefer. I was taught that tapes are best stored after playback rather than after rewind. Think "REWIND BEFORE PLAY" rather than "BE KIND, REWIND."      I know Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, and David Oistrakh, but Jacqui Naylor is a new voice in my collection. The recording was close and crisp, a good studio recording with plenty of intimacy and only a little depth and air. It's about what I would expect if I could get my dream copy of Joni Mitchell's "Ladies of the Canyon" or the Peter, Paul and Mary album "In the Wind." Jacqui Naylor is not Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell or Judy Collins or Mary Travers or Jacqui McShee or Nana Mouskouri. She isn't Diana Krall either. Fine, she's Jacqui Naylor, a rich, somewhat-older, flexible female voice with good instrumentals and a nice breadth of jazz and popular numbers. I enjoyed the album and I recommend it.      Like the first time we heard compact disk (CD) sound, the silence is compelling. My own master tapes are recorded in live-music settings, so there is a continuous clutter of clatter in the background. I don't get the truly quiet moments, Peter Moncrief's "intertransient silence" (a silly term from his International Audio Review). On these tapes with their zillion-decibel signal-to-noise ratios I hear nothing when there's supposed to be nothing.      But silent background isn't the be-all-and-end-all of high-end sound. That's what I hope we learned from digital sound media before, during, and after the CD. Jacqui's voice, the piano, the drums, the cymbals, have more content. They're fuller, richer, and more complete on the tape. It's exactly what a higher-end high-end medium is supposed to be. (It's what I got when I bought that Sound Ideas tape in 1981, too.)      This tape is a joy to listen to. There's more music there, more voice, more piano, more drums, more cymbals, more bass, just more of whatever makes music fun to hear. I remember hifi shows where just about every room was playing the new Amanda McBroom record on Sheffield, the latest audiophile vinyl effort. If I had to walk down hotel hallways listening to one high-end hifi after another, The Tape Project offerings would be a much better choice.      I look at my wall of eBay-purchased half-track, 19 cm/sec (7½ inches per second) factory-duplicated tapes. These are ancient relics of a bygone era, really good-sounding relics, the highest pinnacle commercial audio ever attained. At their prices in their day, owning these was the privilege of wealthy people. If their continuing issues live up to this tape's standard, I wouldn't mind being able to cover my walls with offerings from The Tape Projects.

The Tape Medium      The audiophile community has embraced vinyl records as its analogue music storage and playback medium of choice. Compact disk (CD) is the mainstream medium and there are higher-end digital alternatives like high definition (HDCD) and digital video disk audio (DVD-A), but some of us favor analogue when we sit down for serious listening.      I'm certainly a supporter of vinyl. I patented and manufactured the LOCI tonearm and I have about 4000 vinyl records in my personal collection. Like many older audio junkies, my allegiance to vinyl comes from inertia. There were many media choices including quarter-track tape, vinyl long-play records, 45-RPM "doughnut" singles, eight-track tape loops, and compact cassettes. Shellac 78-RPM records went away when long-play microgroove came and half-track tapes gave way to quarter-track around 1960. The medium of full-size cassettes never gained traction, no loss in my opinion.      When the compact disk (CD) came along in 1982, sold to us as "perfect sound forever," it was important to get the other media, the analogue media out of circulation. I believe it was important to those introducing the CD medium to make sure there was little or nothing to compare it to. The result was a mainstream music industry that doesn't make anything else, no vinyl records, no reel-to-reel tapes, and no compact cassettes.      I believe the high-end audio community made a mistake making vinyl its medium of choice without also including open-reel tape. If we're going to keep analogue sound in our hifis, then we have to resurrect some older technology, something outside the mainstream. As a music collector, vinyl was the obvious choice for a collection, records were easy to make and cheap to buy. Around 1995 I decided to expand my horizons to factory tapes. I have a nice hifi, why not have the nicest medium to play on it?      In my educated and immodest opinion, the right decision for a high-end audio community is to maintain the highest-end medium of tape. The Tape Project is taking us in that direction, good for them.      So why only vinyl? I believe the current trend in audio is rettero is bettero. That explains the almost-total commitment to vinyl over tape, enough to let the tape industry die. It also explains the commitment to vacuum-tube amplifiers when the 1980 solid-state products were far superior to the best tube amplifiers, from then to now. Comparing the ultra-expensive, single-ended, triode amplifiers to the old Dynakit Stereo-70 is flattering only to the old Dyna, but the retro-addicts keep buying them.      If we're lucky, then The Tape Project will continue to produce product this good in this good medium. If we're luckier, then they will create audiophile interest in the forgotten tape medium. (2013 December 9: they have continued to impress me with their product's quality.)