Translation of the German review:

STS ANALOG - a portrait

The Dutch company STS ANALOG is particularly committed to the preservation of analog media. Among other things also with excellently produced audio tapes. A portrait on the occasion of this year's 40th anniversary. At the end of February 2020, I accepted the invitation of company director Fritz de With to visit Amersfoort in the Netherlands.

Fritz de With is the founder and technical director of STS DIGITAL and STS ANALOG respectively. He is a recording engineer and is committed to audiophile production while maintaining high quality standards. His knowledge and experience date back to the 1970s.

His wife Netty de With is Marketing and Export Sales Director, responsible for worldwide sales. She also handles press and public relations. She can be found at every major audio trade show and takes care of visitors at the booth. She is active on all online platforms such as Facebook, etc.

If you ask Fritz or Netty de With what the motivation for their work is, you will get the following answer: It is their deep connection to music and everything that results from it. Music touches people's emotions. The ambition is to produce recordings and sound quality according to the criteria of the best possible sound. Good acoustics result in warm, pure and natural reproduction. That is why good-sounding concert halls or churches are preferred to the studio. Each musical instrument is given the space it needs to develop its typical sound character for the recording. The microphones are placed far enough apart so that they do not influence each other. Trained ears monitor the recording process to be able to reproduce the same sound character in the recording room. The goal is to achieve the high-end standard. The result is reflected in the acoustic placement of instruments or singers, electrical and acoustic phase accuracy, and symmetry in a recording. This means that the microphones must be placed in such a way that the signal distribution for the left and right sides or coherence (linear dependence of two time signals over frequency) are as equal as possible. As a result, the recordings gain transparency and clarity.

In order to guarantee the high standard, which would be difficult to realize in a cost-covering way, audio manufacturers act as sponsors. With the help of these products, such as very good cables, the best is extracted from the studio technology and microphones. STS Digital was founded to market recording series with modified approaches such as "Extended Dynamic Experience", "Celebrate the Art & Spirit of Music", "Siltech-Test-Demo-CD" or "The Absolute Sound" on CD, LP or tape. Recordings with this trademark can be found on the Internet. For the recordings the own MW coding process is used. The mastering process is realized in cooperation with the colleagues of Arjan Rietvink Online Mastering.

My visit also served to learn more about the tapes produced by STS (Studio Tape Sound). Fritz de With explained all the details of this division of the company, which has been revitalized since 2012. This was followed by a demonstration of tapes and a live copy of a recent production from a Nagra T to a Philips N4520. A direct comparison between front and rear tape control confirmed a perfect 1:1 copy result. Between 100 and 120 master tape copies are sold around the world every month. A copying line with six restored and accurately adjusted Philips N4520s is available for this purpose. Only new tapes from RTM (Recording The Masters) and tape reels of the very best quality made especially for STS are used for this production, packed in a sturdy cardboard box.

Then we came to the great division of digital production and also to the Compact Disc (CD). Great efforts have been made by STS Digital to make the CD sound as non-digital as possible. Demonstrations followed about the C.E.C. TL2N CD drive and about different ways of digital to analog signal conversion. I was able to gain insight into digital signal processing with the Marantz AX1000. The demonstration with the DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) Sonnet Morpheus had fascinated me. I was shown one CD after the other. All of them were perfectly acceptable tonally and showed no tendency of a digital sound character on the playback equipment in the studio. However, technology is nothing without the intuition of an experienced recording and production engineer like Fritz de With. I was simply thrilled by the interplay of the digital and analog worlds.

The following answers from the interview were summarized by the author.

Claus: 40 years is a long time. How did it start back then, what was the company's path?

Fritz: The company STS was founded in 1980. The motivation was to be able to act independently on the market. With a small amount of start-up capital, the first equipment was purchased. Through a fortunate event, a large order for the production of promotional videos for a Swedish company was placed in 1982. Professional video equipment was bought and so the start was dedicated to photo and video as well as sound. In 1984 orders from Dutch television followed. The focus was on interviews and documentaries. To make the business not only on this one leg, in 1992 the idea was born to produce test CDs. Live recordings were also used for this purpose. This metier became a great success. The basis was always to produce exactly what the customer was interested in. In 1998 a cooperation with Marantz was established. For further productions an own studio was built in Amersfoort in the Netherlands in 2000. In the following years, the idea of refraining from productions for one-time exploitation was more and more consolidated. More and more recordings of music with acoustic instruments and vocals were made.

Claus: Were there also bitter realizations in the company's history?

Fritz: Oh yes, soon after the foundation there was a crisis in the Dutch market. The start-up capital was used up and there came a bitter period of experience of what happens when too little money flows back into the coffers. From these experiences the consequence was drawn to always analyze the placement of products as best as possible in advance and to have a clear plan for marketing. Too much upfront can ruin a company. This principle is still successfully followed today.

Claus: How was the change from the analog to the digital world experienced?

Fritz: The introduction of the CD triggered a spontaneous enthusiasm in 1983. The digital signal is subject to very low noise and it does not crackle. The focus was on digital signal processing until a friend propagated the resurrection of the vinyl record in the 2000s. A first vinyl production follows, which became a huge success. In 2012, at the High End in Munich, the focus was turned to the medium of tape, whereupon this branch of production was integrated into the company's program.

Claus: How do you see the future of sound recordings?

Fritz: There are no worries about the continued existence of the CD. It's a different story with the production of records: There are too few experienced and also young people who know how to cut the lacquer or metal foil (DMM). This important process should by no means be neglected by the companies. Tape is currently making a big comeback. However, there is only one manufacturer of new tape recorders, and it takes a long time to place them on the market. If there is a lack of supply here, this business may come to a standstill again.

Contact: STS Digital, Poortersdreef 55, 3824 DL Amersfoort, The Netherlands.

Homepage: https://sts-digitalshop.nl/

Interview, text and photos: Claus Müller

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)