We have a number of customers who demand analogue tape, either for sonic or archival reasons.
Many of them are worried about long-term storage and stability of digital records including digital tape formats, and reason that long-term stability of many tape formulations have been verified through actual aging rather than laboratory testing.
Others like having physical media that can be put on the shelf. For music festivals where a large amount of material might be recorded but only a small amount of it actually used, analogue or digital tape might be a solution for these problems.
When acoustics are poor and where mixes may be made almost entirely out of spotmikes, analogue tape can provide a powerful tool to increase the sense of blend and improve the sense of ensemble, creating one whole from disparate parts.
We have the Nagra IV, the best portable recorder ever made, as well as the Ampex ATR-100, possibly the best studio recorder ever made, and other machines that allow us to provide high end analogue facilities that normally would be restricted to studios, and make them available at your site.
Sometimes analogue recording isn’t the right solution, especially if a large number of tracks are needed or in the many cases where that increased blending is a severe disadvantage. That’s fine, though, because we have various digital rigs available as well.
Having a variety of systems available means being able to provide a variety of different sounds at a variety of different price points, and that is a win by any standard.