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76.21.119.24
I just bought a few more tapes on ebay, and I am considering Series II of the Tape Project (I am a charter subscriber to Series I, but the rather large price hike and the first 6 choices for Series II have me wondering if I would be making the right move there). Anyway I digress. RTR basically died as a relatively popular consumer medium in what, about 1982 or even earlier? Yet, here we are, 25 years later still interested.
I am interested in your reasons why you still stick to this apparently obsolete technology. I have mine - yes, I have a library I want to hear (although I have been disappointed to hear how many tapes manufactured by Ampex in the mid 70's have been afflicted with sticky shed......), the best tapes have a depth and dynamic range unrivaled by other technologies, and RTR is just plain cool.
OK, those are my reasons - what are yours?
Tape is still the most dynamic and musical of all the analog mediums so were on the same page there. It's main drawback is as you have discovered; tape deteriorates, especially acetates and sheds the iron-oxide coating over time. The life of tapes can be extended by storing in a cool, (not cold) and dry place and not exposed to light.
Unfortunately, even under ideal conditions tape will not last forever. Print thru or bleeding often occurs after long periods of storage which is also a pain.
These are just a few of the reasons why storage and retrieval of music on tape has been abandoned.
Jon
It is just plain COOL!!!! Not to mention the great sound you get from a good recording.
TGR - I just joined the Tape Project prior to the Series II titles being announced. I too am disappointed in some of the selections, in particular the 1970s funk tape. That said, I am sure that each of us will like some and dislike others. They can't please us all.
In addition to the Tape Project, I have learned that a Canadian firm is pursuing a similar effort with stronger audio potential (according to them), that may be launched in the near term.
Also, there is an Australian company that is publishing newer recording on R2R in high audio quality. The link is below.
From the Quinton web site: "In cooperation with AAA Audio Analogue Association in Germany, Quinton is licensing out premium quality studio master tapes featuring the famous pure sound of Quinton. To achieve the BEST STUDIO MASTER SOUND, these tapes are copied by the AAA Germany in real time onto Studer and Telefunken 1/4" machines exclusively."
http://www.quintonrecords.com/main/mainset.htm
There might be more out there, and if anybody know of other new R2R software sources, please let us know.
Question: which do you think is more important (if you had to choose): spending more $s on a refurbished transport/deck or spending $s on a new outboard repro amp (ie Bottlehead or Aria)?
Thanks, Pat
Canada and quality music -- Ha Ha that the best laugh I had all day.
OK - Canada and quality anything is a laugh now days.
I just happend to look at raw tape prices yesterday - and it is not cheap.
Expect at least 50% of the cost is tape raw materials.
I favor question #2 ... more $ on tapes. You can allways upgrade after the music
but if you don't support tape sales -- you have no music!
Homebrew 6B4G Set,Otari 5050 R2R,Decware's NFX speakers,Pioneer DV-79AVi DVD/CD/SCAD player
Actually it died about 1966 when 3 3/4 ips and Dolby appeared. Companies looked to Dolby to mask the noise and allow them to use less tape. Well IMHO it killed the R2R medium and ushered in the compact cassette. The fumble fingered out number the nimble fingered. I use it because my musical taste lies in the 50s and 60s. I like big bands or orchestras and there was just more of it back then. They also didn't use multi-tracking with single microphones that much and an orchestra performed as one (remember musicianship) into three well spaced mics. So you got a very accurate 3D sound source of musicians performing as one group. It was also less compressed and less processed (LESS IS MORE in an analog realm) because they didn't do that much dubbing or making protection masters. If you can find a good tape at 7.5 ips of the music you like then I think you're ahead. The record companies still have all these masters in their vault but chances are that if some young turk, rock trained engineer got hold of them to make a CD re-issue, he would not be able to restrain himself from processing the hell out of it and attenuate the dynamics. They would foam at the mouth if they heard a little tape hiss. Personally, I'm for NO PROCESSING! NO Dolby! If it was recorded without Dolby then for God's sake don't try to introduce Dolby now! Get back to the original master, if it's playable and the oxide hasn't fallen off. Restore old machines. If it was recorded on a Ampex 351 then restore an Ampex 351 for playback to re-master it. If it was recorded on a 3M then find a 3M and restore it. But they just don't want to go to that trouble. And none of this.... " well we need to give it the Nashville Sound or the Detroit mo town soul sound" with EQ out the wazoo! Ray Hughes
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture." Frank Lloyd Wright
IMO, the introduction of Dolby in professional recording and later in consumer versions was the beginning of the end for good sound. Things went further downhill with early digital, especially RBCD.
Once artificial artifacts were added to the music, it was only matter of time before these got twisted into a necessary part of consumer expectations. The sheep buy what they are sold, and the result was history. Technology has corrupted the process of producing music, not just reproducing music.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Tony, GR, Fly.... I just wanted to say that your series of posts were the most thought-provoking I've come across on the Asylum in the New Year. I graduated H.S. in 75, college in '79, but remember "getting the use of" a R2R back in 1973 (borrowed from a friend's brother), FOR JUST ONE EVENING. The only tape I had to play on it was somebody's live Wayne Newton stuff. Of course, I was fully not interested in W.N., but was floored at the sound quality, so much that I remembered that brief experience to this day.
I had already appreciated non-solid state FM radio output, as I had my grandmother's 1947 Zenith to listen to early 70s FM as a teen (when the FM DJs had creative freedom and the commercial interests weren't so demanding as to be largely in control).
Unfortunately, as the 70s progressed, I got blindly swept up in the portability / "acceptability" of cassette, up to the point that I ended up with close to 1000 home-records from the period of the mid-70s through today (sourced mostly from vinyl or FM).
I got to hand it to cassettes in one small regard though: My friends and I would mail-exchange creative mix tapes and themed tapes, (sometimes interspersed with comedy bits). Living several states apart in the West, we would rendezvous at a central point, such as the Grand Tetons in WY for camping/hiking, but we'd have pre-sent each other "road tapes" for the journeys out in 60-cent mail pouches. EVEN SO, what I would give to experience some of, say, some of my favorite live Van Morrison, or King Biscuit Flour Hour recordings on R2R equipment ! ! !
I just wish I had that "first intro" to R2R that you guys had, and thusly would have gone out and collected and cherished said equipment, instead of funds going into my '66 Mustang. Audiophonically, I was born about 6 to 8 years too late. My hope these days is to keep my eyes open for an estate sale that maybe includes equipment once owned by a true audiophile, at a price I can justify amid the other normal expenses of life. Then, without delay, selecting / recording music on that format would become my new addiction.
One brief point on Dolby, I always disliked the audio loss, and since I was always a "question the direction of the herd kid", I never toggled on the Dolby for recording or playback, happily accepting some tape noise, but categorically rejecting any loss of detail. I wanted to hear Leo Kottke's fingers sliding on the guitar strings, or every bit of a playful, energetic, "outside of the lines" Hammond B performance on a Jimmy Smith album.
Thanks for your comments! Be thankful that you latched onto the best of the best for your ears. Even if you momentarily got distracted from it, you're back to it obviously. So, I am a bit envious of you guys flourishing within that great R2R subset.
I graduated from high school in 1966. My band made a LP record that year and invited a professional recording studio (CENTURY) to record it. The guy showed up in a Ford Econoline van totally equipped with Ampex tube (351-2) and a MX35 mixer and three Sony C37 condenser microphones with miles of cable on two garden hose winches. The experience made quite an impression on all the guys interested in hi-fi in the band. Those students whose parents could afford it went out and bought Roberts 770 or 720s (the poor man's Ampex) and two microphones and many of us got very serious about recording our own stuff. Mostly choirs and a buddy and me actually made a record of an aspiring folk group who wrote a song that THE KINGSTON TRIO picked up and recorded. My listening amplifier was a KNIGHT KIT twin 25 watt power amp with a KNIGHT KIT preamp that I assembled myself with the watchful eye of my cousin who worked for AT&T long lines. I also built my speakers from JENSEN components. I greatly enjoyed listening but as an avid hi-fi enthusiast was engrossed in the literature, AUDIO MAGAZINE and Edward Tatnal Canby's reviews.
The audio world was converting to solid state and this conversion was the first "bad moon on the rise" . Listening was FUN! I listening joyfully to this KNIGHT KIT tube system all through college. but was intent on converting to solid state. Why, the reviews in these magazines were all touting it. It must be better. A company in Texas was selling a solid state amplifier called the SUPER TIGER featured in POPULAR ELECTRONICS magazine that bragged about almost un-measurable distortion. So I sold my KNIGHT KIT system and bought two SUPER TIGERS that I assembled. BAD MISTAKE! These things could not stop oscillating at some super sonic frequency. A PhD in Electrical Engineering could not stop them from oscillating. This same PhD also had purchased the same brand of amplifiers and was intent on making them work which wound up being a ten year quest. They eventually worked but something was missing. Listening was no longer fun but fatiguing after about the playing of one album. You wanted to turn it off and do what needed to be done. Something was going on in this solid state un-measurable distortion amplifier that obviously could not be measured.
At the time I collected pre-recorded tapes and played them on my Roberts 770. Then suddenly all tapes converted over to 3 3/4 ips and suddenly that joy was gone. Hi-frequencies became attenuated and I never bought another tape. Back to the LP, now everything was going QUAD. Two more speakers and amplifiers were added and a SQ matrix converter and a Dolby B noise reduction system. But the joy didn't return. Sound quality to my ears was getting worse not better.
Technology stirs the pot and seems to be never satisfied with a calm standard. Someone is always trying to sell something new and it seems to me IMHO that this rush to make a profit supersedes everything else in our society.
So I went back to electron tube amplifiers and the joy returned. My PhD friend concluded that " you must like to listen to distortion." No I don't think that is true. I think engineers have not served us very well. I'm not an engineer, my degree is in Journalism. I'm a music lover and I want my listening experience to be enjoyable not fatiguing. In short, I don't think you can cut the frequency spectrum up into zones a la Class B or Class AB class C or Class D or anti-aliasing filters with digital and then re-constitute it back together without injecting some artificial artifacts into the music. I think engineers are a little too practical and are enamored with themselves that they can do this. The rest of us have to live with it and may times it is not very pleasant.
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture." Frank Lloyd Wright
What you say is true.
My experiences closely paralleled yours, except I graduated HS in 1974. I started out with SS equipment but fortunately discovered a place 4 hours away in Champaign, Illinois, when I went to the CES in Chicago in 1976. At the show, they had set up a tube based system that was quite apart from all the other stuff I had experienced up to that time, including quite a bit of high-end gear at the CES. Music became a joy to listen to, and I got off the component-of-the-month merry-go-round that so many become addicted to. These guys were a voice in the wilderness, selling tube gear in the mid to late 70s.
I remember the magazine ads for Southwest Technical Products amplifiers back then, too.
Best regards,
Mike
nt
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture." Frank Lloyd Wright
Damn good point! It doesn't really eliminate noise. It psycho-acoustically masks noise at the expense of attenuating dynamics. Ray
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture." Frank Lloyd Wright
There is a new recording on the market where they put all the musicians in one studio and they all preformed in the same session into few microphones. No multi-tracking. And it's wonderful! Ray Hughes
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture." Frank Lloyd Wright
For some of us, it's purely sentimental. As a young college student interested in audio, I barely had enough spare gas money to go to audio shows. In all the best booths, were R2R's playing music on the best of equipment. I coveted the idea of owning one and read everything I could about them. Every time I saw one in a movie, I twinged with jealousy.There's just something about the labor involved in the care & feeding of one, along with the wonderful recording results. It's not about analog versus digital. It's more along the lines of challenge; feeling that you're actually doing something to create music and reproduce good sound. I figured that so many experts had raved about them for so long (and all the master tapes for music were engineered on them for over 40yrs), that there had to be something to it. They were right.......digital didn't destroy analog, it just made it cooler.
Kevin
Edits: 01/13/09
> > > It's not about analog versus digital. It's more along the
> > > lines of challenge; feeling that you're actually doing
> > > something to create music and reproduce good sound.
What annoys me - connected to the above - is that those machines all had microphone inputs, and mostly came with microphones included.
People made recordings of themeselves, families, amateur concerts etc... they were being creative. And the quality of the recording can be remarkably good.
Now all creativity seems to have been reduced to CRAP on You-Tube, made with a tick-tackey cellular phone.
Can eyepods make recordings by the way? Can they take real microphones?
I am cheap, I go for the 4 tapes for $10 on ebay.
But I do know you get what you pay for, so with the money I save
I can afford the next series tapes.
Homebrew 6B4G Set,Otari 5050 R2R,Decware's NFX speakers,Pioneer DV-79AVi DVD/CD/SCAD player
Since I archived all my tapes to DSD, I no longer listen to the decks. I don't recommend open reel to people because the quality of old commercial tapes is too variable (stretched, half erased, distorted highs, etc.) and most open reel decks require expensive restoration (unless you can do it yourself). Also, most people I know (despite their college diplomas) are not technically inclined enough to use and maintain open reel equipment properly (there are no p-mount open reel decks).
Fantastic sounding open reel is the best sound I've ever heard, but most people who play open reel tapes aren't hearing fantastic sound...not even close. More importantly, although open reel has provided the best sound I've ever heard, that sound won't be preferable to everyone because of tonal balance differences relative to most LPs (that people have become accustomed to hearing).
sorry for the typo
I find that well made prerecorded tapes have a richness in the midrange that I really enjoy. Some of these same tapes may have less frequency extension at the extremes and some of what I used to consider necessary to satisfy me (audiophile attributes). On classical music, when the texture gets really thick and complex, I think you have to have a really great vinyl set up to prevent the music from getting confused sounding or hard like on digital. But, as long as the repro electronics are up to the task, tape doesn't get phased by these big musical moments.
I also really enjoy having an active part in my hobby. I get bored with just buying gear and all that A/B stuff just doesn't interest me. So, doing all the adjustments/repairs/modifications and learning about this old technology is fun and forces me to learn other things so I can know what I'm doing.
I guess I'm pretty much over the cool factor part. I kinda forget about that when I take my machine to demos. I just want folks to hear what the real thing sounds like and enjoy the music but lots of people have a tough time getting past asking about the machine. Sometimes it can get tough to explain to folks who've never even used a cassette or vcr.
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