Sony to stop producing Betamax tapes in 2016
JordanCClark
Posts: 198
Did anyone already mention this?
http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-says-it-will-stop-producing-its-betamax-tapes-in-march/
http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-says-it-will-stop-producing-its-betamax-tapes-in-march/
Comments
You can ind some people still using the vintage decks for production, even linear editing. I'm not sure of the benefits, but it was a small but vocal market.
In '86 I traded it for some other video gear, and the person I traded it with then sold it to a friend of his, author Harlan Ellison. Hopefully, it didn't eat too many of Harlan's tapes.
Other than its bad eating habits, it was actually a neat deck. Sony used to make these in red, not just the usual silver or black.
My smart & geeky friend Wendy regularly shows her photo with Harlan on Facebook. A cool and fiesty dude who really got around from the stories I heard.
The problem with Harlan E. is that he's a terrific writer, and he knows it.
Beta Max could do pixel perfect stills and great transitions, when it was not tape munching. There is a cottage industry, running low, off the radar, doing pr0n, and other niche standard definition productions. For a lot of things, SD is plenty good enough, and the product of it can go on DVD and benefit from some additional processing.
A similar thing, minus the pr0n, is happening on audio cassette today, and to a growing extent, vinyl.
Cassette machines never even used tubes...
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Delivering a tape to a mastering lab (for DVD, upconversion to digital, etc.) is still within the norm, though I imagine most now expect a digital format. But I bet there are still plenty of video labs, particularly outside the US, that still accept various analog Beta formats.
When something is produced on the analog path, the people receiving it get something tactile, and it's rare by definition. You can't just go to YouTube and ask for it, because it's very highly likely not to be there.
http://nationalaudiocompany.com/ Note, they feature Type II CrO2 tapes. (best ones in my experience. You can overdrive those just a little to get a great sound with just a shade of grit, for those performances that benefit from it, otherwise, run 'em just a couple db low for best response / noise profile.)
These little productions are cool, featuring hand drawn liner art, nice case, etc...
And despite what people may say, good cassette can perform well enough to really enjoy. It's not perfect, nor is vinyl, and that's the point! It isn't better sound. It is sound people crave. Participating means getting something real that people did too. And there is the ritual of playing the media. If it's vinyl, you deal with your turntable, if needed clean and or lube the record, setup, play, listen. It's not trivial. For cassette, clean the heads, maybe perform an alignment or adjustment to follow a particular tape well enough to get the peak sound possible...
Cassette has a good form factor too. Collections display nicely, and the media is easily handled.
All of this is a carry over from the "demo tape" era. You do your thing, dump it onto cassette and send it away, hoping for a review, airplay, gig, whatever. One subtle thing about this was good music is good, right? Well, if you find yourself craving it after hearing it on often dubious cassette, that meant it really was good. Not always about quality here.
Lots of small bands would, and today still also make their own tapes for sale. Margins are really high on these, and there are no fees, organizations, or anything in the way. Make 'em, sell 'em, make more. One group I worked with way back in the day would get their liners photocopied. Those were black and white line art, with the notes and such. The couple nights before the show, they would color in the liners by hand, making each one distinctive. For their tapes, they had a nice, low noise pre-amp with several outputs. Gang together several good quality decks, load up the tapes, press record, and go, 5 - 10 at a time. This was just part of the evening activities. At all times there were tapes being made to sell. People would pay $10 - $15 for each one too. The recording setup paid quickly, as it generated a couple hundred per night it ran. Easy money. Fun too. All the tapes were for sale at the show, and that's the only place one could get them. Worked out great. These particular musicians all held basic, low wage jobs. The real income came from their gigs and tapes.
They would vary the tracks a little too. If something great happened at a show, that went onto the next set of tapes. That way, people could buy more and talk about them.
Another aspect of this was proof or a token to demonstrate you were at the show, or to help you remember the show you attended. Custom liner art makes these collectible, and there is a running history associated with all of that people find compelling.
I have never even seen a Betamax machine or its tapes. I meant those heinous C60 cassette tapes.
Sadly, the promise of "perfect" sound from digital media and processing chains seems to have been countered by the total disregard for sound quality in recent generations of sound engineers and consumers.
There is a band here, Vinyl Jam, that records to tape and cuts only vinyl. Crazy right? But they love their sound quality so the end result is brilliant despite the short comings of the media.
"like in old glorious time" as the band leader Andre Solomko says.
Sorry, it was inevitable. Resistance is futile.
Thing is, digital can perform better. Some of the best CDs I have are early remaster where the engineers were free of the constraints of vinyl.
But, digital rapidly became about both LOUD and choice.
There are still great productions, but they are lost in a sea of Smile. When I find one, it is such a treat!
I believe that peak and the perfect promise of digital put the art under threat. And what happened became the new art, with new constraints, etc...
If one is really careful, a 128mbps mp3 can sound really good. So many codes slur the highs, why? I have one, just called amp, that I ran on IRIX and it really performed.
Lots of music cuts off at 16khz, just a shade better than FM, and codes do that too.
Then there is the intense wall of sound production. So fatiguing... Deliberate clipping, deliberate noise, etc...
Somehow, perfect failed. Maybe we want art, not perfection.
But I hate any talk of mp3 bit rate this or that. Why do that? 70% of bandwidth on the internet today is sucked with video content. We have a ton of really cheap storage available if we want it. Anything but loss less compression seems totally pointless.