Open reel tape. Does anyone here still use it?

[Stunsworth]

There's a new Revox on the way...

http://www.analogarts.net/project-r2r/

Pre-recorded tapes also available...

http://www.analogarts.net/mastertapes

A bit expensive at around 400 Euros a tape.

[Padraig]

Anyone interested in a Grand Prix du Disque set of 4 Track 7.5 IPS Double Play Stereo Tapes of Beethoven's Symphonies, with Karajan and Berlin Phil?

[Padraig]

Anyone interested in a Grand Prix du Disque set of 4 Track 7.5 IPS Double Play Stereo Tapes of Beethoven's Symphonies, with Karajan and Berlin Phil?

Offer taken up, thank you.

PS I am delighted that these tapes have at last found a refuge. I just hope that they prove good to listen to, as I never got the chance to play them myself. I expect delivery to be made soon - posting tomorrow 25 08 16.

[pastoralguy]

Offer taken up, thank you.

PS I am delighted that these tapes have at last found a refuge. I just hope that they prove good to listen to, as I never got the chance to play them myself. I expect delivery to be made soon - posting tomorrow 25 08 16.

Thank you so much, Padraig!

I'm really looking forward to doing a side by side comparison with their counterparts in the Karajan 1960's set! It's still a mystery why vinyl is experiencing a come back but reel to reel isn't. Perhaps it's due to the fact that reel to reel was aimed at the upper end of the market so there are fewer tapes available.

[richardfinegold]

A family friend passed at the age of 90 a few years ago. She was a hoarder and she had a Grundig that had possibly belonged to her long deceased husband. The children gave it to me and after months of cleaning and trying to figure out which parts had given up the ghost and finding replacements I got it to run. Sort of. I had picked up some pre recorded reel to reel from the second hand store (Karajan 63 Beethoven cycle) and the two tapes that I bought both split about 5 minutes in. I sold it as is in a fit of pique on an audiophile web site and have always regretted it.

[Gordon]

I used to own a series of Revox models ending with an A77 High Speed [ie 7/5ips/15ips]. Mostly used for off air but also with a couple of AKGs for other things too. At work we had a Studer A80 which was well engineered and quite nice to set up but still needed regular alignment especially if for financial reasons [eg our buyers in the stores] we changed tape type. Mostly in those days we used 3M Scotch 207 in maximum thickness. Playing pre-recorded tapes [or especially cassettes] needs the machine to be correctly set up; many cassette players even some good ones don't provide the means. One can buy alignment tapes to help with this process. Cassette machines need to be really good at keeping the tape from weaving as it passes the heads.

To get the best out of any tape machine [including cassette] it needs to be set up correctly otherwise performance suffers, especially if any form of Dolby or similar noise reduction is installed. I remember being quite put out when I checked my brand new A77 to find it was way off electrical alignment. Most decent machines, but not all, provide the means to set them up - and in the case of Revox the handbooks [at extra cost] are very good. It can be a time consuming process and ideally needs access to suitable good quality test equipment. When the heads show signs of wear and have to be replaced it is not a job for the faint hearted.

Tape formulation is important and each machine should be aligned on a particular type for best results. Correct bias and equalisation are essential. There is no perfect setting either; the bias needs to be set for a compromise of factors balancing distortion and bandwidth remembering that whilst these are normally set at low record level [especially frequency response, typically -20dB on full scale meters] at high audio levels bandwidth dives alarmingly and one needs a bit of distortion to brighten the sound. My Revox meters for example were way off correct. Much later machines offered a dynamic bias facility that altered as the programme level altered but that in itself is compromise.

So if your machine sounds a bit dull or lacking in performance get it aligned properly. Another thing you need to invest in is a demagnetiser regularly to remove any built up magnetism in the tape path and in the heads. It goes without saying that tapes need to be stored carefully and the tape path must be scrupulously clean. The more one learns about analogue tape recording the more one wonders that it works as well as it does.

[Dave2002]

I never owned a reel to reel recorder, but I had several cassette recorders (and still have a couple). I was very surprised with one, which was a Goodmans model. The cassettes made on it were quite good, and indeed I made some cassettes which a friend borrowed, and he said that on his rather better equipment that they were really very well recorded. Many cassette machines were deficient in one mode or another - either recording or replay - or perhaps both, so that it was possible to make good recordings but they would not sound quite so good, or vice versa - either way leading to an overall loss of quality. Often, though cassette machines would sound best when replaying tapes made on them, and many were useless for playing pre-recorded tapes.

One adjustment I did try to do once, since it was possible on that particular machine, was to adjust the azimuth setting, and I was able to do that dynamically with a tape playing. I was really quite surprised to find that on a recording of a violin concerto, adjusting the setting had the effect of moving the soloist from left to right or vice-versa. Not fully left or right, but definitely left or right of centre. I simply expected a change of tone but there was a definite stereo shift, and it took me a minute or two to work out that this was consistent with the phase shift/delays between the left and right channels affected by the azimuth setting.

[Gordon]

Your experience with the azimuth illustrates well the effect of small changes to the geometry of the small dimensions used in what is effect a consumer device. To get such a thing doing as well as it does is quite an achievement. One can say the same sort of thing about CD when one looks at the dimensions of the tracks and the way that the disc can move in a non ideal way beneath the laser readout. One thing about Compact Cassette I never liked was the built in pressure pad. Some high quality mechanisms like Nakamichi etc actually disengaged the pads using double capstans to control tape tension and hence head to tape contact. The integral pad was really a cheap way of allowing the building of the transport at low cost.

You may also have noticed that even when you'd optimised the azimuth there was still some image shifting going on as the tape wove through the mechanism effectively altering the azimuth dynamically. With 1/8" tape only 0.2 degrees of error can shift the phase of 10kHz by a whole wavelength, ie 360 degrees or 100 microseconds, which is audible. Amplitude differences between channels that are changing by that sort of amount are not so obvious but there will be a small contribution to the image stability. Tape interchange was always one of the big bugbears of tape recorders even at professional levels. When broadcasters exchanged tapes the EBU standards required a number of test signals and tones at the start of each tape to allow the reply machine to be matched to the recorder if required. Imagine the issues in a record company with many machines and where the cutting of the LP disc is not done with the machine that recorded the master - in fact that master may not be the original but a first generation copy - that machine could be miles away.

With pre-recorded cassettes one has to rely on manufacturers getting their azimuths lined up with each other! The other factor there is of course that the tapes are copied at enormous non-real-time speed so the copying machines have to be built with high precision with the audio frequencies being translated up towards the MHz region which is a challenge to the record heads. I still have an alignment cassette somewhere because I still have a good quality 3 head cassette machine [with a good range of adjustable things and good access to the heads and transport mechanism!!] that I use occasionally for transferring cassettes with off air material on them!! I still have boxes full of them but have lost some of the will to live as I look at them. But the test tape for the Revox went when I sold it.

I've just been reminded that some while ago while demonstrating this cassette device to an exacting "audiophile" friend that I inadvertently did not engage the Dolby B replay system so he heard the tape without correction - he thought it was very impressive, hiss, pumping HF lift and all!!

[Dave2002]

Tape interchange was always one of the big bugbears of tape recorders even at professional levels. When broadcasters exchanged tapes the EBU standards required a number of test signals and tones at the start of each tape to allow the reply machine to be matched to the recorder if required.

Nowadays, if there were any interest at all, which is incredibly unlikely since there are now better technologies, it should be possible using computer technology to optimise the settings of a replay deck to the tapes being played on it dynamically and automatically.

[Gordon]

IIRC some Nakamichis had some of that sort of thing built in! I think they even had automatic azimuth adjustment. But then Naks were the tops and their prices showed it too! The thing about R-R machines was really that they didn't challenge the magnetic recording physics etc as much.

[Lordgeous]

The trouble with Nakamichis was that tapes made and played back on a Nak... sounded great but not so good when played back on other machines. I believe they used some sort of non standard eq correction of their own. I still have, and use, an Aiwa Excelia XK009 which sounds, well, excellent! My studio technician serviced and aligned it recently and was astonished how good it sounded. A 3 head machine with adjustable everything, its used for transferring clients cassettes. I still have Cassette and R to R alignment tapes (thank goodness).

In the days when I had a small purist classical/folk record label our albums were licenced to a company specialising in real time cassette copies which were well regarded. We also sold individaully made R to R copies to enthusiasts and to companies like Quad and KEF who used them for equipment evaluation. We even heard them being used at Hifi shows!