In the summer of 1969, Warner Brothers released Van Morrison's legendary and memorable Moondance album. In 2001, at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, renowned engineer/producer Elliot Scheiner digitally archived the original multitrack tapes to ProTools and the Alesis HD24 recorder. I had the pleasure of attending and documenting the session for Alesis. An original engineer on the 1969 project, Elliot comments, "The original format was 8 track analog. We recorded at 15 ips, +3, no Dolby, no anything...It was 3M 202 and its absolutely amazing. We heard a little bit of it and its incredible." During the session, Al Schmitt stops by and comments "Soloing the tracks they sound fabulous." You can almost experience this. In this video, the first 12 bars of the track Moondance is the audio captured on my video camera mics in the control room. Boy was this fun. And a pivotal day for me. These tapes were stunning, and hearing them reminded me how wonderful analog 1-inch, 8 track, 2-inch 16 track tape can sound. big, sparking, clean and quiet, even without noise reduction. It becomes instantly apparent to me, how far backwards the industry went with the broad scale adoption of analog 24 track and its smaller track width.