Having worked as a music producer for Sony, BMG, Columbia and Universal, places him in the perfect position to get all those important master tapes he needs to create the different forms of copies available from HH. His role within HH is toward the hardware, and technical operation and production, and his colleague Thilo Berg, who founded the jazz and classical music label Mons Records in Trippstadt in 1991, deals with record deals content and software. Back in Germany Volker Lange also is Managing Director for Lutz Precision, making precision machines for car industry, to which Horch House is the analogue audio division of this parent company. There are, believe it or not, several other niche-pre-recorded reel to reel tape retailers around the world, The Tape Project from America and Opus 3 label from Sweden, being two that spring to mind. He is one of the two owners of Horch House, a German company selling high quality vinyl, digital (24/96 24/192 64fs DSD) and now reel to reel master recordings using RMGI SM468 tapes on metal reels. My favourite personal machine is the Revox PR99, which is also the favourite of a certain Volker Lange, who owns two.
BERT KAEMPFERT WIMOWEH PROFESSIONAL
The top machine of choice, as any serious reel-head will know, is Revox and their professional arm Studer. I have amassed a collection of 18 reel-to-reel machines over the years, from Fidelity and Ferrograph to Tandberg and Telefunken. Recording straight to two track most of the time, meant that mixing on the SSL, Calrec or Neve decks at the BBC needed to be right first time, and if you needed to do retakes, then the settings of the previous take needed to be remembered, so that edits mid-way through a symphony didn’t suddenly move the viola section on top of the horns (they should be sat some 20 feet way from each other!) My own career as a sound engineer started with chinagraphs, razor blades and sticky tape.
In a very short time it has moved away from analogue to digital from reel to reel past Betamax,DAT and CD, now to computer storage and manipulation. The last 30 years have seen the biggest changes in the recording industry. The original analogue recordings from 1961/62 form the basis of Christoph Stickel’s unobtrusive “refurbishing” which aims to avoid any artistic intervention and here it is released on Reel to Reel tape from Horch House. Janine Elliot takes a listen to the Album “A Swingin’ Safari” which was recorded in the Polydor Studio, Hamburg in 1961/62.