Quantegy

» see quantegy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Quantegy made magnetic tape in Opelika, Alabama. When it stopped, no American company was making professional recording tape. The name is young for what it was. Ampex spun its recording media arm out in 1995, just as 3M was letting go of its own magnetic media division. Equitable Life Insurance bought both and renamed the result, and the sale completed that November. The coaters and the town were both decades older than the brand on the box.

What came off the line were the reels professional studios mastered onto. The grades ran from Quantegy 456 up through 499 Gold to GP9 Platinum, and later there was a line of external hard drives sold to the same customers under the Black Diamond name. The Ampex catalog was the nominal survivor of the 1995 merger, but 3M's chemistry ended up inside the high-end stock, and that is where GP9 got its reputation.

The trade's own summary of the company's standing, written the week the plant stopped, is that Quantegy held the number one market share worldwide in professional audio mastering tape, and that more albums went gold on its tape than on all other brands combined. Sales in 2004 were reported at about thirty million dollars. The plant that produced all of it had employed around eighteen hundred people at its height and was down to roughly two hundred and fifty.

Production stopped in January 2005 and restarted that April under new owners. It stopped for good in April 2007. A supply line the US Army wanted in 1945, so that the country would not have to buy its tape from anybody else, ran out in an Alabama town sixty two years later.

~ the case file ~

~ orradio and the army's tape problem ~

Magnetic recording tape was a German invention, and by 1945 the German capacity to make it was rubble. The US Army wanted an American supplier. Major John Herbert Orr set up Orradio Industries in Opelika to be that supplier, and that is how a global pro-audio supply line came to run through a small town in east Alabama for the rest of the century.

Ampex bought Orradio in 1959 and ran it as the Ampex Magnetic Tape Division, and that is the arrangement that lasted: thirty six years of Ampex-branded tape coated in the same plant. The 1995 divestment did not move the factory or the formulations. It changed who owned them and what was printed on the box.

~ january 3, 2005 ~

The workers came back from the Christmas break and were told not to return. The company's statement ran to six words: Quantegy has ceased operations pending restructuring. Every employee was laid off pending further notice, sales and support staff included. The industry found out secondhand. Larry Leuck of Magnetic Media Services said the company had been put into Chapter 11 and Quantegy sources reportedly denied it. An investment bank called Equity Partners was hired to go looking for a buyer, with liquidation still on the table.

A buyer appeared. Peter Hutt and Frank Foster, who ran Discount Tape out of Peachtree City, Georgia, took control on 18 April 2005 for a reported 5.8 million dollars. Sixty five people went back into the Opelika plant and the coaters ran on the first day, with new tape shipping the same week. Hutt's line to the trade press was that demand was actually higher than it had been recently, and the outgoing chief executive, Richard Lindenmuth, said the company had been starting to make promises that it would be back. The practical problem was quieter than either quote: none of the old contracts existed any more, so even NASA had to be negotiated with from scratch.

~ the april 2007 order deadline ~

In January 2007 Quantegy announced it would stop making magnetic tape that April and would take orders until 22 February. Reel Deal Pro Audio bought most of the remaining reel-to-reel stock and sold it off a website. The hard drives went in June and most of the Opelika production equipment was sold off in 2008. A 2009 plan to revive 456 and 499 Gold had produced nothing by 2012. A reel of mastering tape is something you buy because a studio is charging you for the hours it runs through a machine, and I have never been on either side of that invoice: by the time the coaters in Alabama stopped, anything I recorded was a file with a bit rate attached. quantegy.com is a Sedo listing today, and the two manufacturers left standing after April 2007 were RMGI and ATR Magnetics.

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