TAPELESS RECORDING
The Age of Magnetic Tape, 1950 to 1995: Are we at the end of an era?
It most certainly looks that way.
Recently I attended a classical recording session in New York, the first I'd been to for quite some time, a whole evening on location in a large Catholic church.
It turned out to be state of the art and much, much more-and, at least for me, full of astonishing surprises. How things are changing! In the "remote" control room, an office in this big, opulent church, I looked at thousands of dollars of recording and monitoring equipment, all of it the very latest, ready for a long evening of recording. But there was no tape.
NO TAPE??
Almost none. To the best of my knowledge, one small smidgeon of the stuff, enough for, at a guess, a few minutes or so of the old-style recording, was inside a modest DAT unit, two-thirds rack size, not even the primary medium out of no fewer than three systems recording simultaneously.
This in contrast to the great cartons of tape reels, 10 inches and up, at past sessions, the hundreds of miles of obscenely wide ribbon running at obscenely fast speeds--15 ips, 30 ips--which fed the big, old recording machines of umpteen million sessions in the past! No tape. How soon will this be the standard setup? Any day.
Paradoxically, the new record company, Epiphany Recordings, is tiny compared to many a giant. As far as I could figure, it boasted a huge catalog, at the time of my visit, of exactly one available CD, and several more listed but as yet unreleased including the music being recorded that very evening. Normal advance publicity. Yet don't our audio innovations often begin with technically super outfits, which are small in terms of production and sales? In this day and age of over weening bigness, yes! It's obvious, no matter how the biggies may churn and toss to keep up. Smallness is innovative. Bigness bogs.
The absence of recording tape was just the beginning. There were also, for me, fascinating musical connotations in this session and the same for numerous earlier audio innovations and procedures out of the past, suddenly updated. Start with the music.
Epiphany is the brainchild of two men named Kipnis, the second and third generations in a distinguished musical family that many will know from the recent and more remote past; I have been familiar with the work of all three. Kipnis I, Alexander Kipnis, was one of the finest bas so singers in the early part of this century, born in the Ukraine, educated mainly in the German areas before World War I, picked up at a relatively late age (like Kirsten Flagstad from Norway) by the ever-zealous Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he became a household name. Kipnis I would now be 103, though I remember his marvelously resonant voice well enough; he was not at our recording session.
Kipnis II, Igor Kipnis, has long been well known in the musical world as a harpsichordist and forte-pianist, very much alive today, the son of Alexander and an equally pure musician, though both can be heard on records. Igor made his debut and reputation as a harpsichordist, somewhat to my amusement at the time, because until he came along, all extant harpsichordists were little people, beginning with the minuscule but dramatic Wanda Landowska, the Mother Superior of the harpsichord movement, who was per haps 4 1/2 feet tall. The succeeding well known players weren't much bigger, including a number I knew: Ralph Kirkpatrick, Putnam Aldrich in Boston, Edith Weiss-Mann of Hamburg and New York. All were mousy. Igor Kipnis was a giant in comparison. He made the harpsichord (or fortepiano) look small and probably feel small as well. Kipnis II, like his father, was a pure musician and artist (he is Epiphany's Artist & Repertoire man and prime performer as well). Kipnis H even sports the Jeffersonian side curls in his hair that are now a musician's trademark. I gather he is not the least interested in audio engineering except for practical purposes. Throughout our recording session he stayed mainly in the "live" musical area, down in the church nave, with some musical friends, paying occasional brief visits to Engineering headquarters. Entirely pleas ant to all on hand, including me, but distant from all that equipment. Without Kipnis III, where would he be? Lucky he, to have, in turn, a Kipnis son who lives in our world and with obvious pleasure.
Kipnis III, son of Igor, grandson of Alexander, is Jeremy Kipnis. Not a name that comes from the Ukraine. When I first heard about this joining of Ks and found that it was Igor, not Jeremy, who approached Audio with a request to send someone to the recording session, I thought it sounded all too much like a dominating papa financing a doting, but maybe not so talented, son for his own recording company. Two minutes with Jeremy Kipnis, and that idea flew out the window in a hurry. Kipnis III is a born audio man well on his way to genius (my personal opinion). Whatever papa, Kipnis II, might do to help Jeremy would be just fine, but Kipnis III is clearly able not only to assemble fabulous audio equipment on his own but also to modify it, even in cooperation with top equipment company engineers and other audio men of his generation. So with Igor and Jeremy, we have a real symbiosis, a pure musician and an equally pure audio man, and all in the family. Interesting.
Jeremy has an engineering partner, Karim Ibish, who is at the company offices in Amherst, Massachusetts, but was at the recording session. Kipnis II and III currently live in Connecticut, with both recording and editing at that location, as well as in New York. A decidedly peripatetic outfit (see Gilbert & Sullivan).
WITH IGOR AND JEREMY KIPNIS, WE HAVE A REAL SYMBIOSIS, A PURE MUSICIAN AND AN EQUALLY PURE AUDIO MAN.
To make a beginning on the equipment, the primary medium used by Epiphanythe ultimate master, is not DAT but a sys tem I had yet to hear about (though our engineering people surely know it): Glass optical discs, ODMs. Each disc, about the size of a CD, holds some 30 minutes of recording-there were quick changes of disc every so often, with a spoken ID put down on each. I have all the specs (much too much to pass on to you), but clearly the quality of this optical digital system is remarkable-24 bit, lowest jitter of any digital medium, and so on. Also note this: "Professional archive performance." Aha glass lasts and lasts, assuming you don't break it. Glass is good for hundreds of years, right? Even Roman glass, which is mostly darkened by now, still might be read into viable audio after 2,000-odd years if we had a few Roman recordings on hand.
So, can you imagine a recorder that not only uses no tape but is also, at least in part, removed from electronics, tied to light circuitry, made on glass? The other two systems were far more conventional, though the latest thing on the market. DAT and, if you will believe it, MD, the Sony digital disc with lots of controversial compression, generally distrusted by both purist engineers and far-out consumers.
All of these were operated, the whole triple recording chain, via battery power. Even the mikes. Not a plug in the wall anywhere.
How many recording sessions do you know that were all-battery? Well, I know of two, both my own and both a long time ago. For once, I anticipated Kipnis III, and by some 19 years. With the help of the Swiss, my Canby Singers and I borrowed the very first portable stereo Nagra and, in a New Jersey wooden church, did an entire recording session on batteries, even the rewind. The Nagra has been largely a film-biz machine, but its Swiss makers nevertheless contrived to switch their marvelous foot-square baby (running 15 ips with professional quality) to the stereo mode. Not exactly as small as today's handful of stereo DAT, but very small for the day. I even carried it home in the New York subway. The little beast, of course, ate D-cells like crazy. I forget how many at a time. But we used batteries for precisely the same reason then as Jeremy Kipnis does now. The next year we did it again, with add-on arms to take 10-inch reels. Unlike the earlier Magnecord extensions (which I tried), these actually worked, giving us double the recording time....
And so it went, something unusual at every turn. Special cabling-Cardas Litz, Golden Five, Hexlink Five (I'm just reading the specs)-even the a.c. was super-special, for the monitor playback-a big battery-powered d.c. inverter for a "pure a.c. 117 volt sine wave." Wow! Con Edison, dip your head in shame.
I end, before I am editorially amputated, with what struck me as a lovely controversy-generator. Jeremy Kipnis says he prefers (and so do friends, musical and otherwise) the Sony MD much-compressed system to the professional DAT, also Sony. There they were, together, as second and third simultaneous recording media. Like ice cream, MD is smoother, richer, more inviting in musical reproduction, says Jeremy. Or words to that effect. Than DAT? Swallow this thought if you can, friends, and come back for more in another installment.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Nov. 1994)
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Also see: Currents by John Eargle (Nov. 1994)