On the 14 November, that bit of Ampex that makes the tape, became a standalone Corporation with a new name. Following all of the changes that have taken place at the Ampex Corporation over the last decade or so, it was little surprise that the tape making division was formed into the Ampex Media Corporation a year or so ago. In the UK they were moved into new offices in preparation for a complete severance from the Ampex parent company. The delay since then has been the name for the new company and this has now been announced as Quantegy Inc. Now 100% owned by a new group of shareholders including the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the US, the company will handle all the audio and video tape products originally Ampex. It will also own the tape Ampex plants and they still have the rights to use the name Ampex on the products. It may seem that little is changing for the user, but with the new owners comes a lot of investment, something that has been lacking for some time. Ampex already has the number one market share in professional audio tape and ironically as the announcement was made on the same day that 3M began leaking the fact that they were about to pull out of tape media, it is difficult to see exactly what all this new investment is going to achieve - it would appear to be all theirs by default.
When the official statement from 3M arrived it confirmed the rumours. 3M will be withdrawing from 'future participation in audio and video tape manufacturing ....withdrawing from the market over the next 12 months'. They have stated that their prime consideration from 1996 is to maintain quality and supplies of tape products across as full a range of formats as possible. Reasons for the decision focus on intense price competition preventing the business from making a satisfactory return on investment.
If 3M does totally disappear as a manufacturing name it will end a connection of almost 50 years with professional audio, as one of the early pioneers of tape, the move into tape recorders and the first commercially available digital recorders. Personally, I'll remember the hilarity we used to find in those technical bulletins 3M would issue to support the longevity of their products and in particular the notion presented in all seriousness that, even after a nuclear war sufficient to annihilate the human race several times over, 3M would guarantee less than a 1dB degradation in the noise performance of recordings which had been made on their tape; something they'll now never have to back-up.