The bottom line is that the professional community needs 3M back in the magnetic tape business. As professionals, we need a quality product produced by an industry leader and 3M is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla that can bring all of the required disciplines under one roof. Analog and FM-digital open reel magnetic recording are proven reliable long-term storage mediums, whereas optical disk technology is mainly being aimed at the end-user who has little regard for recording permanence. As a society, we are in danger of losing an entire generation of music to optical digital media failure that may happen in our lifetimes. Professional open reel machines were designed for hard daily use, and many of them have been kept running with care for over 50 years. (i.e. Ampex, Presto, and Magnecorder to name but a few) Those machines have recorded many miles of tape, and it isn\'t possible or even practical to transfer every one of them to a digital format. The new breed of CD-R and DVD-R based recording has exhibited both hardware and software issues in the recent past, including media failure. To trust masters to consumer formats is suicidal since these formats were never intended for use in professional environments. Also, consumer formats come and go. What will happen to a master recorded with a proprietary digital format where the decoding algorithm and proper software are no longer supported or just plain don\'t exist anymore We hope 3M management sees the need for their magnetic tape products again and will consider what will happen to the music industry without them. We really ned you guys. Please come back.

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