TALE of the TAPE

RHINO LAUNCHES REEL-TO-REEL TAPE SERIES UNDER ITS HIGH FIDELITY BRAND

- by TOM FINE

Rhino Records, Warner Music Group's back-catalog label, has jumped into the rarified niche of prerecorded reel-to-reel tapes.

Under the Rhino High Fidelity brand, the first two titles were announced last October: T. Rex's Electric Warrior and The Yes Album. Both are limited editions; no more than 500 tapes will be made and sold.

Rhino joins a surprisingly long list of companies currently producing reel tapes for sale to audiophiles. Retail prices are hundreds of dollars per album, and some are closer to $1000. Most of these labels are selling little-known music by little-known artists, but there are bigger players including Chad Kassem’s Analogue Productions (AP) and The Tape Project, which licenses classical, jazz, and rock titles from Sony, Universal Music, Concord, and other copyright holders. In Europe, Horch House in Switzerland licenses classical titles from Universal, Warner Classics, and others. Smaller audiophile labels—2xHD and Chasing the Dragon to name two—sell tape versions of titles already well-regarded on vinyl and/or CD/SACD. Nowadays, there are hundreds if not thousands of albums, new and old, available on legitimately licensed reel tapes. There are also a few pirates in the business—likely known to readers with a strong interest in tapes—but we'll focus on companies with legal rights to produce and sell tapes.

How the tapes are made

Reel-to-reel tapes were an early stereo format, circa mid-1950s, with many labels in the game. Those early releases were two-track: Each channel of stereo took up approximately half the tape width, with tape playback in one direction. In the late '50s, the quarter-track format was introduced: four tracks on the tape, two channels for each direction or “side.” That meant that half as much tape was required to hold an album; the tradeoffs were lower signal-to-noise ratio and the requirement for tighter azimuth tolerances for optimum playback.