While were at it: Does anyone still use a Reel to Reel deck?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Dean De Furia, Sep 3, 2003.

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  1. Bob Lovely

    Bob Lovely Super Gort In Memoriam

    Hi Steve,

    The 1988 date is probably coincidental unless there were some major formulation changes around that time. I was very sad about my 111 going bad. Those tapes were irreplaceable, sadly - airchecks recorded at 7.5 ips of AM Top 40 stations from the mid to late 60's using my (now old) Tube Heathkit AM Tuner. I used to take my Reel recorder (Sony 250) and that Tuner with on the family summer vacations and make airchecks of local stations as we traveled. This way I got local, clean signals for recording.

    Bob:)
     
  2. Dean De Furia

    Dean De Furia Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Northern NJ
    Bob, I would love to hear some of thoise airchecks. Any way to salvage some of them? Baking?
     
  3. Bob Lovely

    Bob Lovely Super Gort In Memoriam

    Dean,

    I would too! They suffered from really bad sticky/shed problem and they were rendered as unplayable. When this happened (1990?), I threw them all out, reluctantly. This was long before I ever knew about baking and restoration. I was ignorant then about such techniques. Sad too because the tapes sounded very good because of the way I had recorded them and I had strong, local signal airchecks of then well-known Top 40 stations such as WLS in Chicago, KXOK in St. Louis, KOMA in Oklahoma City and many others....

    Hated to even share this here because of this...

    Bob:(
     
  4. Dean De Furia

    Dean De Furia Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Northern NJ
    Wow Bob, Very sad. It would have been nice to hear big, fat tube AM sound in the days before they compressed the signal to death.

    Oh well......
     
  5. -=Rudy=-

    -=Rudy=- ♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♫♪♪ Staff

    Location:
    US
    I actually own two reel decks--one is a Sony which needs some work (a TC-580--mainly needs adjustments, and maybe some new rubber here and there), and the other the Teac, which seems to be built a lot more sturdy than the Sony. I'm definitely going to dump the Sony when i get a chance, but I'll hang onto the Teac for a bit until I decide if I want to spend a little more and get a better Teac, or a Tascam or other reliable brand. Nothing I'd use often, but good for transfering reels to CD if I needed to.
     
  6. sgraham

    sgraham New Member

    Location:
    Michigan
    Bob,

    Sad about those tapes. Also unusual. I've never heard of 111 going sticky-shed on anyone.

    Dean,

    AM radio *can* sound surprisingly good, but high levels of compression were being used even way back when. Not that that would keep those tapes from being interesting, of course.

    (The best sound I ever heard from AM was when I was fiddling around and just hooked up a diode to a length of wire and a crystal earphone. No tuning of any kind, but I could get WJR so much louder than anything else, and of course there was no filtering. It was surprisingly wide band. It's often the radios that kill all the bass and the treble above 3-5 kHz; even radios with good FM often do this.)

    I was in a thrift shop today and saw a little portable Craig reel machine. Actually this one was a delux model with a radio built in that you could record off. Took something like 4" reels, and had that capstan sleeve that you could remove to make it go at half speed (probably 3 3/4 and 1 7/8 ips) Made me very nostalgic - reminded me of my own first tape recorder, a GE. It was so exciting to have and play with. I caught just a whiff of that old excitement, looking at the little 3" reel of tape it had. I nearly bought it; but I don't need *more* old junk!
     
  7. Bob Lovely

    Bob Lovely Super Gort In Memoriam

    Steve,

    Those tapes all went bad about the same time. Perhaps, along life's journey they were not properly stored at some point - hard to say.

    I have an old (circa 1957) tube Heathkit AM Tuner. This tuner is wide band and it was designed to be a high fidelity AM Tuner. With a strong signal, AM stations sound surprising good with a nice fidelity. This was my Dad's Tuner when I was growing up and the same Tuner that I used to record all those airchecks back in the 60's. I can clearly remember how those 60's AM Top 40 stations sounded on this Tuner - better than you might expect. Sure, they were obviously using compression and limiting but the 50kw stations tended to be less 'processsed' in that era. And of course, during that era most, if not all, AM Radio transmitters were tube based. My father was Chief Engineer for an AM Top 40 station in my hometown and I remember he used to take great pride on how well his station sounded - as long as he could keep management away from the transmitter!:laugh:

    Bob:)
     
  8. sgraham

    sgraham New Member

    Location:
    Michigan
    Heh. Yes, there've been wars between management/program director and engineers for sure.

    I'll bet you'd be hard pressed to get an AM tuner that sounds as good as that Heathkit did nowadays, if only because hardly anyone takes AM fidelity very seriously these days.
     
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