REEL TO REEL?

[DRBILL]

ANYBODY want to talk about commercial reel to reel? I have a shelf full of these!

DR BILL

[texas42]

I picked up an old vintage Akai reel to reel a couple of months ago (GX-4000D, with glass heads) when I bought some other vintage stuff but don't have any tapes to play on it. If anyone wants to give it a good home and has some tapes, let me know. I'll let it go very reasonably and it is in excellent condition...

Regards,

Dave

[BEC]

Dr.Bill

Are you talking about recorders or tapes.

Bob

[DRBILL]

I was wondering who had similar early R to R tapes and how early.

I have about 25.

I play them on a NOS AMPEX which came from a defunct radio station.

They are better than CD but not as good as vinyl.

This is a response to who had the earliest CS's.

DR BILL

[Parrot]

A properly made reel tape would be better than the vinyl. But the problem is that these commercially sold open reel tapes were made from dubs of dubs of the master, and they were copied at terrifically high speed on duplicating machines. So all the potential advantages of reels were lost. Real-time copying would have been prohibitively expensive and could never compete in per unit cost with something that can just be stamped out. So you're quite right; the real world commercial open reel tapes are for the most part pretty sad.

[WMcD]

I recall that some commercial releases were available on 7.5 ips tape in the late 1960s. They were two track stereo and by flipping the tape over you could listen to "the other side". So there were four tracks on the tape.

I recall Herb Albert's "Whipped Cream and Other Delights" as being available on tape. Of course it had very memorable cover art. The Lonely Bull too. He was the A in A&M.

They were pretty good competion for LPs. No surface noise. None the less, these were for audiophiles and never caught on with the public.

There may have been some bad duplications. Thinking back, I'd think that the only machines for duplicating were the studio type 15 ips which used very large reels in normal practice.

There is much to be said for the big reel 15 ips machines. Reports were that these were the workhorses of the recording industry and capable of excellent results when aligned. Some say better than digital.

There is a story that Roy Dolby was selling his noise reduction system, then the "A". He some doubt how much it was used. But he overheard some technicians saying how they were going to use the "Dolby" to feed a 15 inch machine and get excellent results. So he realized his product was, indeed, apprectiated.

Sony had an early cassette version of reel to reel running at 3.25 ips.

The whole tape thing started getting crowded with the 8 track continuous loop. Quite clever in that it would unwind off the center and feed back on the outside of the single reel. Of course the tape on the reel was always slipping against itself.

Radio stations used something like an 8 track with just two channels. Pop the cart into the machine, hit the play button, and it would play one song or a jingle.

The 1.78 ips cassette came forward. Advent added the Dolby B noise reduction. Less tape hiss. Marginal in my view.

The big reel to reel machines held sway for some time for serious audiophiles. CD and digital eventually swamped out everything.

One of the problems with tape is that the oxide layer, and whatever glued it to the plastic tape, would decay. Therefore historical recordings on tape masters only a few decades old fell apart to the point of being unplayable.

There is some archiving industry where the masters are played for one last time with the oxide flakeing off and the technicians doing the best they can to capture the sound in digital. OTOH, the vinyl and shellac masters survive relatively well.

Tape and its poorly considered lifetime must have lead to the common lament: "It seemed a good idea at the time."

Gil

[No Disc]

My brother had a nice Reel to Reel unit and has a variety of recording on RTR including some jimmy hendrix live shows from 70's "off the board."

I doubt they are any good. His RTR player is long gone and his RTR collection is sitting in storage in Southern California. Sure would like to find out if those recordings survived.

- tb

[BEC]

I was using tape back in the 60's. Pretty soon I just gave up on the commercially available tapes. Just no highs in them, likely because of high speed duplication. What I did use tape for was to record off vinyl for daily listening purposes from the tape. My typical thing to do was buy a new record and play it 3 times on my manual AR turntable to get the "new record" groove trimmings out of it, then play it 1 more time putting it on tape. The only reason I would ever play the record again was to replace the tape or to compare the record to the tape if I thought something might be amiss with the tape recorder or tape. I saw a demonstration before I started that procedure that proved (to those present at least) that the high frequency data in the record grooves starts to deteriorate on the vinyl record after as few as 10 playings using 1 gram of stylus pressure.

Bob

[joshnich]

I have tons of reel to reel tapes of LPs. In the old days, there was a record store in Berkeley that had a taping club. You paid 5 bucks to join and you could take home a LP to tape for 50cents if it was new and 25 cents if it had been used by someone else to tape! Of course this record store sold new records for $2.65 and $2.32 if my memory serves me. But as a high school student being able to take home records to tape ( on my Tandberg model 6 - the first piece of high end audio equipment I ever bought) was great! oh BTW the record store was Leopolds and they were some sort of Co-operative store that was non profit.

Josh

[ZAKO]

I have master tapes some as old as 25 years old. If kept in proper temp & humidity control they will last without detieration for alot longer without shedding or breaking. Their was a period of 3 yrs where binding glue used was of inferier quality causing delamination of oxide. That had to be corrected by bakeing the binder & recopying the master tape. I have never had that problem. I never bought blank tapes from those years. My reserve skiped over those years. Tape head relaping or replacement is now my concern. Im trying to find a 2 track (stereo) playback R to R 10 1/2 machine in good working condition.

[khorn58]

I use a old 3m two track master deck reel to reel,

its about the size of a stove.

This deck runs at 15 and 30 ips and the sound I get out of it is trully amazing.

I have used tapes on it as old as the mid 70's.

With old tapes or any tape that is suspect bake them as this will save them.

If you do a net search yu will find directions for baking tapes at home.

Most high end pro studios still use reel to reel to recored and master on.

The digital had never really aprouched the sonic warmth of anolog tape.

the pro reel to reel lives on.

[Marvel]

I managed to work on an album that was recorded at the old RCA studios on Wacker Drive in Chicago. The date was around '71. Sixteen track @ 30 ips. Ate up a lot of tape that way. If the pressing would have been better it would have been ... better. There are a lot of studios who will record certain instruments to tape, and then immediately transfer them to their digital systems, be it Protools, Nuendo, Samplitude, Sonar. They get the nice tape compression with the editing capability of the PC.

If you want to find out some analog info, check out Eddie Ciletti's web site:

http://www.tangible-technology.com/

He has info on baking tapes to keep the oxide from falling off. Couple hours in the oven ...

Marvel

[ben.]

I was never convinced about 30 ips. The low frequency response was unpredictable. Nice headroom, though.

[Parrot]

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On 3/28/2004 11:10:13 AM Maron Horonzak wrote:

Im trying to find a 2 track (stereo) playback R to R 10 1/2 machine in good working condition.

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I wholeheartedly recommend the Revox PR99. They are 1/4 inch, 2 track machines, with two speeds each, either 3.75 ips and 7.5 ips or else you can get 7.5 ips and 15 ips. Built extremely well, and sound superb.

Since I assume you don't want to record, you can get these as playback decks only, without any recording circuitry.

They were something like $2000 when they came out, but you can get excellent condition ones on eBay for under $200. I've seen them go for as low as $125. Units with the recording features bring a little more, but not much. As always on eBay, there are some tremendous bargains that come up sometimes, like with BuyItNow, so if you're not in any hurry, just follow the auctions for a while before bidding to get a feel for what the machines bring, and wait for just the right one in great shape.

Also, the NAB adapters for large hub 10.5 inch reels are expensive for Revox. So look for an auction that includes them.

[ZAKO]

Paul....Thanks for the advice. I,ll start hunting on ebay today.

[DrWho]

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On 3/28/2004 6:03:32 PM Marvel wrote:

I managed to work on an album that was recorded at the old RCA studios on Wacker Drive in Chicago. The date was around '71. Sixteen track @ 30 ips. Ate up a lot of tape that way. If the pressing would have been better it would have been ... better. There are a lot of studios who will record certain instruments to tape, and then immediately transfer them to their digital systems, be it Protools, Nuendo, Samplitude, Sonar. They get the nice tape compression with the editing capability of the PC.

If you want to find out some analog info, check out Eddie Ciletti's web site:

http://www.tangible-technology.com/

He has info on baking tapes to keep the oxide from falling off. Couple hours in the oven ...

Marvel

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for what it's worth, some of the studios still edit the actual tape too...check out www.prosoundweb.com and you'll find all sorts of articles talking about the benefits of going back to analog or at least entering the digital domain as late as possible.

[Benesesso]

I had a good friend who was in the tape duplicating business for many years. I must strongly disagree that high-speed duping causes a loss of highs, lows or anything else! I've heard such tapes that sounded GREAT!

One time I went with him and a small crew to the Allen Organ Co. in PA. to record their early version of a "Moog" synthesizer. We recorded on an Ampex at 30"/sec. with Sony condenser mics., and the 7.5"/sec. copies were FINE!

Getting good results was always a trade off among S/N ratio, freq. response and distortion. You had to give something up in one area to gain in another. The various noise-reduction methods were a God-send.