A few high end studios are still using reel to reel tape. It’s also worth noting that a good music store is the only place you can walk into and buy vacuum tubes- because that’s what a quality amp or fx pedal uses.
Laugh if you will, but cost and convenience are why these things are borderline extinct- it’s not for lack of quality.
Back when I struggled to get 300 baud on a compact cassette, I had my eye on my uncle’s reel to reel tape deck. I reckoned I could overclock my UART and get 9600 bps out of it.
Because data is not a thing, and it can’t get stuck in a dusty box. Maybe data about current pop culture will get copied endlessly, over and over, into eternity - or maybe it will just be forgotten.
I have a tape desk from the 40’s that rhas ecordings of my parent and grandparents…and my mother singing things like Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday.
That something to keep. I doubt any modern digital technology will last 70 years.
That’s like saying that music isn’t a thing, and can’t be put in a box. Digital music still requires a storage medium. I’m already finding my Dad’s old external hard drives from the 90s, all dusty and forgotten for the past decade and a half.
What the heck kind of interface do they use? I don’t recall USB HDD enclosures getting big until well into the 2000s. Parallel? SCSI?
The only copy of data can get stuck in a dusty box though – and on media that is hard to access. That’s the problem with a lot of original scientific data. Some of it, like stuff from the Apollo missions, is “sexy” enough to attract volunteers to recover it. Data from other fields, not so much.
I believe the main drive I’m thinking of was Firewire.
I live 2,800 miles away; my sisters and visitors are handling the recording stuff.
I think gold watches on pretty much on the way out as well.
A Grateful Dead recording on magnetic tape is no less “data” than an MP3 on someone’s iPhone. Data resides on physical media, and old PCs and flash drives and SD cards can certainly get stuck in a dusty box.
Yeah stored on server forgotten is pretty much an identical problem with stored in a box forgotten. It’s the “forgot that you had it before it became valuable” that’s the issue, not the medium.
Right on! I’m in my 40’s and I’d love to have ones of these to play around with!
I have inherited my grandfather’s reel-to-reel and would love to pass it on to my great-grandchildren. I was told he was one of the first private owners of a tape recorder in GB. It is a Grundig Reporter 500L, the first portable tape recorder: http://www.grundig.de/en/company/about-grundig/grundig-history/years-1945-1954/
He recorded telephone calls, many without permission. As well as interesting confidential discussions, the tapes contain a series of birthday wishes for my father’s 21st. He was studying in the US at the time and was sent the tape. It’s fascinating to listen to that tape while navigating the family tree, putting voices to the names and faces.
I’d be honored if my great grandson took any of my reel to reel or 4track tape gear and used it to record samples at various rates then sampled them back. There’s so much life in tape. I’ve bought brand new recordings in the last decade. Antiquity is awesome, especially when it was engineered to work with field replaceable parts like this gear was.
Great tape deck in use (?). This weeks picture of " putin and medvedev drinking milk " (image search)
That’s more or less what I was thinking. I recall reading the US National Archives has exactly this problem with very old census data - some of it, nobody can figure out how to retrieve.
And yes, of course data is data. I guess I was thinking that analog data is easier to retrieve because there’s less encoding. I don’t recall ever seeing a way to quantify that idea, but information theory was a very long time ago for me.
tech that lasts and continues to work as long as you care to own it and use it…and we are laughing at them? seems like they should be the ones laughing at us.
From the '40s? You think your tape deck is 70 years old? Really?
He probably is playing some weird instrument made from an arduino and a guitar hero controller or whatever, tape loops will be a great addition to his hipster/“maker” noise setup 
