Our mission is preserving heritage master tapes and uncovering their true audio fidelity.
From the Iron Mountain website, July, 2025:
“We understand the fragility of older audio carriers and the risk of playback damage, which is why we use well-maintained vintage decks and carefully customized workflows to ensure safe transfer.”
It's tragic that the record labels Sony, Universal and Warner (Iron Mountain’s music industry customers) still don't comprehend that the last thing you’d want to do with a fragile, chemically-degrading master tape is play it back on a vintage tape machine. Doing that has destroyed too many irreplaceable tapes and damaged countless others.
Further, using a recorder-reproducer for tape playback can’t deliver optimum audio quality. The reasons lie in the dynamics (classical mechanics) of the tape as it travels through a recorder’s transport and headblock.
If you work with high-value analog audio tapes and are interested in the science behind ATAE professional reproducers that protect fragile tapes while letting you hear them in their true highest fidelity, contact our sales department and ask for a list of our product technical papers.
We’re in California, USA.