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Is Reel to Reel really that good?


Jim

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Tape is a magnetic media and after about 20 years the tape loses its charge.

 

No idea where you got that.  I have tapes older than that.  No problems.  Actually, my oldest is a couple of 3" reels from my first battery machine, which would be a little over 50 years.  Do they sound any worse?  Well, that's problematic as they weren't exactly hifi to start with...but still quite clearly audible and understandable.

 

Dave

 

 

 

Good point.  Though it's not RTR....in my opinion, it's worse....it's a Cassette.

 

Back in 1969 my dad took me to see Apollo 11 take off.  He had a little hand held recorder and pretended somewhat to be a reporter during the several days that we were gone.

 

During the actual lift-off I turned the machine on and from 1-2 miles away, recorded the sound.

 

Somewhere around 2005, something like 45 years later he was cleaning some stuff out and found the old tape.  He sent it to me so I could do with it what I wanted.

 

I sent it out to a restoration guy who copied it to a CD

 

You can still hear/feel the power of that Saturn V as it lit the candles.

 

Heck...  I'll see if I can attach it as a WMA file

 

Nope, won't attach.  Can send if anyone interested.

 

That's an awesome story, you sure paint a nice picture of a time and place with your Dad. I'll bet that was a site to see for a young fella. I always wanted to see the Shuttle take off, but never got to. Maybe someday I will get the chance.

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Good to hear from GaryRC.

 

He brings up some issues from the old days which should be mentioned.

 

There was acetate tape which would break clean, and mylar tape, which would stretch but was basically stronger. 

 

Also, you could buy reels of tape of different thickness.  With the thin you get more recording time on the reel but with some print through.  When the tape was thin, the second layer would magnetize the first.  You can hear this sometimes on archived recordings.  In a quiet spot you hear what was recorded a few seconds earlier, and a few seconds later.

 

The studios could use 15 ips and thick tape and big 10 inch reels.  At home, there were compromises with the smaller reels.  It is somewhat analogous to the bandwidth, sample rate, mp3 compression of these days.  To get more music in the same media there are going to be compromises.

 

IMHO, the vinyl recording sound different because compression was used and people like that.  Tape didn't use that and should sound different. 

 

WMcD

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I still own a could of R to Reels a tandberg 64 and a Sony that I cannot recall the model of. I can still pull out my old tapes that I recorded 40 years ago and they sound awesome. A bit of a side bar ...... When I was in high school, there was a record store in Berkeley that had a "taping club" there was an area of the store that had nearly new lips that if you were a member of the taping club you could take an Lp home for a rental fee of 25 cents and tape it and then return to the taping club section of the store. If the record you wanted to borrow for taping was not in the taping library you could grab a new Lp and take it home for 50cents and then it became part of the taping club. The store was Leopolds Records and I still miss it to this day. I still have about 70 tapes that I recorded from that taping no club

Josh

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I'm seeing a bunch of people talking about how good reel to reel sounds and am wondering just how good it sounds.

 

What is the passion with it,and why bother with it? Is it that much better than records? Or is it just the new fad?

 

Even if it is that much better, how do you go about copying records onto it? Don't you wind up losing SQ copying from the source?

Yes, it really does sound that good. I have pre-recorded tapes going back to the mid fifties, but mostly from the 60's and 70's some of them are extremely good, others not so much. The best of them are as good as any other media you could compare them to.
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In my opinion,  there is nothing better than a mixed down master tape (or direct copy) on a good machine. It's like vinyl with a CD black background. Now this is for 1/4" 1/2 track 15ips recordings and not the mass produced slower speed 4 track tapes of the 50's, 60's and 70's. I don't think reel to reel will ever return to its glory days. It just won't appeal to this day and age of instant gratification. For me it is like the Japanese Tea Ceremony; part art and part ritual. Also the law of supply and demand has the price of admission set very high. YMMV

 

Here are few sources for reference quality tapes.

 

thetapeproject.com
ultraanaloguerecordings.com
opus3records.com
mastertapesoundlab.com

 

Here is a picture of my machines. The Tascam BR20 in my go to for serious listening. The Revox C270 my other 2 track machine. Although the Teac X-2000M will do both 2 and 4 track. It's more a consumer market machine like the others.

 

Teacs.jpg

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The big issue with some maker's rtr tape is not the magnetic issue but 'sticky shred'.

 

Fully agree there, but being a professional audio engineer in those days I used Ampex mastering tape exclusively for any important tasks and TDK SD for routine use.  Neither show any signs of physical or audio degradation this day.

 

I recall testing one tape I never even put on a machine.  First taste was to take about a 2 foot piece and pull.  This one immediately shed ALL particles leaving a clear piece of tape. 

 

Dave

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I still own a could of R to Reels a tandberg 64 and a Sony that I cannot recall the model of. I can still pull out my old tapes that I recorded 40 years ago and they sound awesome. A bit of a side bar ...... When I was in high school, there was a record store in Berkeley that had a "taping club" there was an area of the store that had nearly new lips that if you were a member of the taping club you could take an Lp home for a rental fee of 25 cents and tape it and then return to the taping club section of the store. If the record you wanted to borrow for taping was not in the taping library you could grab a new Lp and take it home for 50cents and then it became part of the taping club. The store was Leopolds Records and I still miss it to this day. I still have about 70 tapes that I recorded from that taping no club

Josh

 

I used to frequent Leopold's.  I miss it and I miss Berkeley, where there was always music in the air.

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The entire thread I see no mention of digital tape recorders :ph34r: DTF/D.A.S.H.....which where the benchmark of studios by the late 80's. They didn't suffer any of the problems compact disc did/do with Redbook and all. Completely different animals apart from the analog decks.

Edited by Quiet_Hollow
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The big issue with some maker's rtr tape is not the magnetic issue but 'sticky shred'.

 

Fully agree there, but being a professional audio engineer in those days I used Ampex mastering tape exclusively for any important tasks and TDK SD for routine use.  Neither show any signs of physical or audio degradation this day.

 

I recall testing one tape I never even put on a machine.  First taste was to take about a 2 foot piece and pull.  This one immediately shed ALL particles leaving a clear piece of tape. 

 

Dave

 

 

Here's the list of tape prone to thanks to some guy named Google:

 

http://www.recordist.com/ampex/docs/misc/sticky-shed.html

 

My recollection is that this list is pretty accurate.

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Back in their day Reel to Reel was the highlight of any audiophiles system..... Generally a centerpiece.... There is no way I would ever not had a RR tape going during a party..... or just having people over..... Sound quality.... Unquestionably for its time (if done right) it was the bomb

It was/is a combo of great sound quality plus play length. You could get quite a few hours out of great mix tapes. At the time amazing and super easy to use. These days though, digital kids would be baffled as thier seemingly endless storage capacity would make reel to reel seem very limited. Being an old bugger, should I happen across the right Rtr in good condition, I'd snap it up in a New York minute.

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C'mon RTR guys, fess up. Tape is a magnetic media and after about 20 years the tape loses its charge. There is no way a RTR tape from BITD sounds as good today as it did then.

And even if a quality recording is made today, I have two words for you; tape hiss. :P

If stored properly you can delay any significant magnetic remanence decay well beyond 50 years. They don't yet know the upper limit.

The Academy of Recording Sciences (the Grammy People) has set standards for backups after mastering and require the master be backed up in two formats. One is on a hard drive of a particular brand and format. The 2nd one is on anologue tape. The hard drives were failing, or format was obsolete and couldn't be replayed too often that they require an anologue tape backup.

The problem was the defective polyester binder material that was used for a period of time towards the end of the technology. This results in sticky shed syndrome.

The brands and types of tapes that have this problem are well documented. The other problem is tapes in the mid-50s were acetate. Acetate leaches acidic acid, and can eat through a metal can.

When I went to Hope in 2011 to make safety back ups of some of Paul's original recordings, from the 50's, they all sounded great. Some were on acetate and I started making backups of those first.

I used a Tascam for playback as it is known for having one of the gentlest transports ever made, The only "breaks" I encountered were where track splices were made and the splicing tape had just run of any holding power. This is very common in 50 year old tapes. I just re-spliced and moved on.

He recorded most everything on 1/4" 2 track, and I want to say at 7.5 ips, but some of it could have been at 15. There was no 30 ips.

I had no reference to compare it to, but this stuff sounded incredible. He had a deal with Shamrock so a lot of it was on Shamrock, which later was bought by Ampex.

There was a Gathering going through so I dubbed a few different tracks onto a playback track and played some church organ music, a jazz quartet, and a train going through Hope (that Paul had originally recorded) for a few groups of people going through.

One person said "there's no hiss, how did you do that?" He recorded on very good equipment, so there was that, but I used zero noise reduction of any kind. With plus 9 tape whatever little hiss was there was I can bury below the noise floor.

Generation to generation does impart more noise with tape, But if it is recorded properly, you can't hear it in the typical recording process.

Everything was on tape from the 50s to the late 70s before it reached vinyl. Early Beatles was on a 2 track, than a 4 track. There might be 10 overdubs as they bounced 2 tracks to one, and so on. There is no hiss in there, EMI was know for being able to overdub multiple times with minimal noise.

It is one of those things you have to hear for yourself. But I don't know of many people who have heard a Tape Project tape that didn't think it was the best version they ever heard.

I brought a still sealed reel of Kind of Blue to a little Klipsch gathering at LarryC's in Maryland which he played on his Revox, several people said it was the best version they had ever heard. There wasn't any hiss.

But there is a lot of junk out there, like Columbia House 3.75 ips.

Edited by dwilawyer
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The problem was the defective polyester binder material that was used for a period of time towards the end of the technology. This results in sticky shed syndrome.

The brands and types of tapes that have this problem are well documented.

 

 

Some of the tapes that had the sticky shed were attractive because of their great electrical characteristics, but were nearly unusable.  I ended up going back to Scotch (3M) 206 which was very reliable.  Since it was thicker than 207, it didn't have the problems of thin tape.

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C'mon RTR guys, fess up.  Tape is a magnetic media and after about 20 years the tape loses its charge.  There is no way a RTR tape from BITD sounds as good today as it did then. 

 

And even if a quality recording is made today, I have two words for you; tape hiss.  :P

Tape Hiss!!! That's so funny, I have tapes here that I know for sure are quieter than any record in your collection plain and simple!!!

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