A damn shame, but I agree some overseas company will pick up the slack (uh bad
pun) in making in making 2' reel-to-reel tape, or the price for the remaning
reels will skyrocket out of sight.  BTW Who's still making 1/4 inch tapes now?

They are still making plenty of blank cassette tapes in Japan and Korea,
though
I remember reading a news story a few years back said that blank tape sales
have dropped 80% since CD-R/CD-RW media took off. 

Related link, I guess:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A3
2476-2002Oct28&notFound=true

Billy


At 10:30 AM 1/4/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Cut and pasted from Jack Endino's mail-out thing.
>
>---
>
>EXTRA: SKY FALLS!!!
>
>Speaking of negative... Today came word that the Quantegy plant in
>Opelika, AL was shuttered and padlocked over the weekend. Employees
>greeted the new year with no jobs. Quantegy (formerly Ampex Corp.)
>was the last remaining manufacturer of two-inch analog tape for
>multitrack recorders!
>
>EMTEC (formerly BASF) in Europe shut down a couple years ago, after
>having bought out AGFA a few years before; and before that, 3M (aka
>Scotch) sold their tape manufacturing business to Quantegy and became
>Imation. So, from the standpoint of the recording industry, the sky
>has fallen, and much sooner than anyone realized. My guess is that
>the Quantegy tape manufacturing facilities will go on the auction
>block, and someone in China will be making 2 inch tape within a year.
>But this is pure speculation; no one is talking yet. Newspapers have
>not been able to reach management for comments about the surprise
>shutdown over the holidays. Stay tuned: search "news" at Google,
>keyword "Quantegy".
>