Archival Mastering

One of Mr. Toad's more unique services involves mastering to 1/2" tape at 30ips. This process is exceptionally well suited to the mastering of albums that have been done entirely in the digital domain. In addition to getting the very best "sound" that tape has to offer, the entire master is effectively backed up to analog tape, thereby facilitating the longest possible life span for playing back the album master. This can be of great benefit if the need arises for remastering to a different or higher resolution format than the CD you originally mastered for, such as DVD or SACD.

Analog tape has essentially reached the zenith of its development. Not only did it have well over 50 years to reach this point, but it still has the infinite playback resolution that makes porting your master to ANY higher resolution digital format significantly simpler than PCM audio (24 bit/44.1 kHz , for one) digital file can offer. For example, DSD (the underlying digital format behind the Super Audio CD) samples at 2.8 mHz with a bit depth of 1 bit. This format "could be" the future of digital audio distribution, yet the math involved to re-distribute PCM data to DSD is quite challenging, and music shouldn't have to get calculated like that. With your master archived on analog tape it is a simple, flat transfer through the latest A to D converters and the job is done. The analog tape will always have the resolution to make a higher quality digital transfer than before.

We have remastered material from tapes ranging back to the early 50's with great success. So we personally can attest to a solid 50 year lifespan on analog tape (depending on storage conditions and tape formukation, etc. etc.). Others report success with tapes from as far back as 70 years ago. Tapes made today have the benefits of all those years of research and development into making the best possible and longest lasting recording media available. If tapes made 50 years ago, in the infancy of the polymer sciences, still play back fine today, it should be no great leap of faith to count on todays modern tapes to last easily as long and then some.

Many people think that digital files will somehow have a longer useful life than an analog tape. We disagree. Consider the DAT. How often do you hear of those tapes having playback issues just 2, 5 or 10 years down the line. The "all-or-nothing" approach of digital tape (where it either plays it back right or it sounds absolutely heinous) is hardly a reassuring format for the permanent storage of your priceless audio master. CDR seems like a worthy storage medium. However, think back just a few years. It wasn't hard to hear the industry sales pitch saying "this disc will still play back in 100 years". Does anyone still make that claim? No, because everyone acknowledges that there are plenty of ways to make a CDR fail to read and it doesn't take a long time. Take a CDR and leave it on the dashboard of your car for a week, then try to extract the data digitally and you'll see how "100 years" may actually be as few as "100 hours". In the last year or so, every manufacturer of CDR media has added a new premium line of "archival grade" CDR to their products, clearly attempting to address the reality that CDRs don't guarantee long term readability of your files. Are these CDRs enough, will they make digital a reliable archival format? It is a format just leaving its first decade of existence.

If those points alone aren't enough to prove the point of analog tape as the ultimate archival format for your music then add this to the picture: your music transferred to 1/2" tape run at 30 inches per second is -in our mind - the single most satisfying step that you could possibly commission to enhance the sound of your digitally recorded project. It sounds like the records you grew up loving. Even the finest "digital" bands of today (Radiohead, for one example) still transfer all their music from digital format to analog tape so as to achieve "that sound." We use extended frequency response Flux Magnetic mastering heads on our ATR-102 - the finest heads available - so you can be assured that this is the only analog transfer of your material you'll need.

This process adds about 50% to the cost of a typical mastering job, plus the cost for the reels of tape. We heartily recommend this process as the absolute best way to make your project sound good today and be viable for playback at any time in the future.