BOB GARFIELD: If you're older than 15, and you have ears, then analog tape has probably defined the way you've heard recorded sound. Your favorite albums, the dialogue and score in your favorite films, radio shows like this one - even data from your favorite space shuttle missions - all have been captured on analog magnetic tape. It's been the standard since World War II, but gradually it's been overtaken by cheaper digital technology.
And so, almost inevitably, on December 31st, the last tape manufacturer, Quantegy, filed for bankruptcy and abruptly closed its doors. As far as anyone knows, it represents the end of a medium. Musicians like the indy band Wilco felt the loss immediately. They continue to rely on analog tape for the warmth and richness they say it conveys, and they found unlikely company with NASA, which is stockpiling the same tape for use on the space shuttle.
Culture maven Rick Karr has been watching analog tape's slow demise. He joins us once again. Rick, welcome back.

RICK KARR: Bob, it's always a pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Very briefly, tell me the entire history of magnetic tape.
[LAUGHTER] How did it come to be so much the standard?

RICK KARR:Well, it was way better than what came before it. The kind of analog magnetic tape that we've been using until recently really came about in the 1940s. It was the Germans during World War II who perfected it, and the reason that it was great was, number one, it sounded better than anything we had prior to that that could record sound. That would have been wax cylinders or shellacked discs. Number two, you could record for a long time. I mean you could just put reel after reel after reel up and keep going, so you could record an entire symphony in one go. And third, you could eliminate mistakes. You could just use a razor blade, and suddenly mistakes disappeared from musical recordings.
So for all these reasons, by the late 1940s, early 1950s, when these machines and this tape were available in the United States, the old ways of recording direct to discs were pretty much dead at that point.

BOB GARFIELD: So, not to belabor the obvious, but why is it going away? If it's so great, why has it been so universally replaced by digital technology?

RICK KARR: Well, because the digital stuff is in some ways greater. I mean I've seen 14 year olds with Apple ibooks making records in their bedrooms that sound better than the kinds of things that you could do on hundreds of dollars of analog equipment 15, 20 years ago.
Why spend money on a tape machine? If you run a facility that's making radio commercials, there's no reason for you to maintain a tape machine any more. You just give everybody a computer and let them do all the work right there on their desktop.

BOB GARFIELD: There's some audiophiles who believe, despite the ubiquity of digital, despite its ease of use, despite its low cost, despite all of its advantages, they can still tell the difference between an analog recording and a digital recording. Are they imagining that? Are they sentimentalizing old technology? Or is there some there, there?

RICK KARR: There are a couple of things going on there. I mean first of all, what you have to remember is that as recording technologies have evolved through history, there have always been people who have looked at the new technology and said the old stuff was better.
Having said that, it's really easy to tell when somebody has made a bad or even a mediocre digital recording. In the typical recording studio these days that's recording, say, rock or country or jazz, they're using a combination of both - so you can't necessarily tell what's what - some of it's analog, some of it's digital - because analog's better at some things, like recording a drum kit - a drummer playing full blast sounds great on this 2 inch analog tape; it's a little harder and a little more expensive to get all the gear that makes it sound good in the digital domain.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, in fairness to the Luddites, there are some storage issues in digital recordings, because the standards keep changing. Analog standard has never changed, so we - is that a reason to start hoarding audiotape, or will that soon take care of itself?

RICK KARR: Whether it'll take care of itself or not is still an open question, and, I mean, you're absolutely right - I mean, we don't know - we've been using analog recording tape for 60 years. We know that that stuff is stable. We know that it works. The digital stuff? Yeah, there are issues with that. DVD-Rs and CD-Rs decay over time.
The thing is that the price of the digital stuff is so much lower now, and so for a lot of production, it's much better to just have it all on a computer. You can save that money. So yeah, there is something to be said for those preservation issues in the analog domain, but, but I think that that doesn't really outweigh, for most people, the advantages of digital.

BOB GARFIELD: To the layman out there, or even the music enthusiast, does the death of magnetic tape mean anything? Will anyone even notice?

RICK KARR: It is the end of an era. I mean there's a story about an announcer on the Bing Crosby Show who pluralized a word that he shouldn't have pluralized, and one of the engineers said "Don't worry; I can take care of that." And he took the tape - this was the first taped radio show in the history of broadcasting in the US anyway - and he just took a razor blade, and he cut out the "S" - and he played back the tape and the announcer said "Oh, my god - this is a miracle. We don't have to go back and re-do that whole segment." And he carried around that little piece of tape in his pocket, because it was such a miracle to him.
So, we can't over-estimate how amazingly influential this was in the early days. That said, I don't think most people are going to hear it these days.
Final point here: Let's not necessarily assume that the analog tape is going away. Quantegy has filed for chapter 11; they've closed this plant in Opelika, Alabama. But chapter 11, as we know from what we've seen in the airline industry, doesn't mean the end. There is actually an investor who's trying to put together a group of investors to buy the Opelika plant. It's certainly fading. It's certainly a specialty product, but it's probably got another good 10, 20 years of life in it.

BOB GARFIELD: Oh, well, in that case-never mind. Rick, thanks.

RICK KARR: You're quite welcome, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Rick Karr is developing a book and documentary television series called Techno Pop: How Technology Makes and UnMakes Popular Music from Bach to Britney and Beyond.