Metaxas & Sins Debuts Papillon Tape Recorder

Amsterdam The Netherlands, Europe| 2021 – Metaxas & Sins, for their 40th anniversary, today announced the debut of Papillon, the first 100% technologically new reel-to-reel tape recorder to be built in 50 years. Papillon, which means “Butterfly” in French, is at once a superb audio recording device as well as a masterful work of industrial design. Kostas Metaxas, the creator of the Papillon, has a long history of innovation and achievement as an artist, designer and audio engineer.

Metaxas was drawn to this project after a lengthy search for a device that could equal the old reel-to-reel recorders’ ability to capture audio in its full depth. As he found, there was no modern equipment that could perform as well as the older technology. As he put it, “The most well-kept secret among the most elite of recording artists is that they still use technology from even before the 1940’s to capture their ‘emotional essence’ or ‘spirit’ in their recordings.”

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Indeed, as Metaxas, noted, “Nowadays, mostly recorders from the 60s and 70’s are continually serviced by old-school technicians because there simply is still no way to capture the vivid reality and depth of richness that tape offers over the strictly digital medium.”

It has been a long journey for Metaxas. He purchased his first pair of recorders from Stellavox in Switzerland in the mid 1980s. His desire was to produce reference recordings to assist with the development of his Hi Fi systems [with over 300 concerts recorded] and hopefully a digital recording recorder. At the time, the Swiss Stellavox SM8 portable and TD9 Studio recorders were the price of a suburban house in Melbourne, Australia. Now, almost 40 years later, Kostas still hasn’t found a digital recorder that can replace the medium of Analogue Magnetic Tape.

With the Papillon [and previous location recorder “Tourbillon”] Metaxas & Sins is currently the only company in the world who can produce a full system from serious concert recording to the highest fidelity playback of that recording.

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About Kostas Metaxas

Kostas Metaxas is an award-winning artist-designer, acknowledged with three awards in 2018 along. Drawn to the shapes and textures of old master painters and sculpture since he was a teenager, about the same time, he was introduced to Hi Fi equipment and fell in love with the art of music reproduction. To him, art and design is “visual music”.