2 Track Tape Decks, New Arrivals, and a Chance To Own the Very Best

[Mallette]

Well, all the below explains why I never saw one. Most of the stations I worked for had tape that was mostly short pieces of acetate connected with splicing tabs. I even worked at one place that was still using Magnecorders! Sliced my fingers early on trying to come out of rewind as they had no brakes. You had to develop a touch for dynmic braking (often more like "breaking") using the opposite direction. The rewind motors were direct drive and would flat FLY. That time I sliced my fingers I also wound up with 1200 feet of tape all over the floor in about 5 seconds. Our first class thought it was a reel hoot!

3500 for that Nagra? That has to be a used price, right? And a REALLY good one? Nagra IVL's were around 4000.00 back in the late 70's and I am stunned you could get anything from them at that price.

Dave

[Fast996]

"An ambitious entrepreneur, Sawyer was running a small record-pressing plant called Apex at 2009 W. 69th when, around 1965, he partnered with an older recording engineer, Vaughn Morrison, who designed and built a studio one door west. Most people knew it as Sunny Sawyer's studio and others simply called it Apex, but its proper name, painted on its glass-brick facade, was Morrison Sound Studio. In '61 Morrison had produced a top-ten pop hit, "This Time," for Indiana native Troy Shondell.

"Morrison was a genius," says legendary Chicago engineer Ed Cody, who often hired him to make stampers for his records. "Very knowledgeable." Though relatively small, maybe 1,200 square feet, the recording room had a rounded ceiling designed to disperse sound evenly. "Acoustically it was a live room, instead of a big dead-sounding studio," recalls Jerry Mundo, a musician and songwriter who frequently worked there. "It didn't suck up a lot of sound, so most of the things we did came off bright and very definite." The studio was stocked with high-quality Austrian microphones and an Ampex MR-70 four-track tape recorder, a costly top-of-the-line machine. "Unfortunately," Mundo says, "only three tracks were working, so we'd have to mix down and ping-pong. It was tedious, but it was better than having one track or two tracks."

This article mentions Vaughn Morrison a recording engineer and studio owner from the Chicago area.He had an MR70 4 track machine used to record the Jackson Five

circa 1967.Morrison sold the studio and moved to California.There were 2 MR70'S in a warehouse in Chicago that where in need of repair that sold in 2006

.

You can find references to the MR70 on the internet they show up in the most unlikely places as this article attests.The Recorder sold for $7000 in 1967 a very large sum

for such a small studio but Morrison was a recording engineer for 59 years .It would be something to hear how he came to purchase it ,many small studios probably had them like Kearney Barton Studios in Seattle.

.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/gyrobase/the-jackson-find/Content?oid=1191672&storyPage=2

[Mallette]

Fascinating...

Thanks for sharing.

Dave