Home Tape Trail

Reel to reel, cassette and other analogue tape formats.

RE: Home recording

If you can afford 15 ips half-track you can forget NR systems. You can get a good deck for somewhere around $1k or less, like an Otari MX5050 B2 or later series recapped, aligned, and relapped, or a Studer B67 for $3500-ish. Tape will run you around $75 a reel (1.5-mil 2500 feet). Take it up to a much higher level with better repro amps, like Dan Schmalle's Bottlehead or the hard-to-find Manley repro amps.

The performance difference between quarter-track consumer machines and studio machines is enormous. I found that good digital far outperformed quarter-track tape, and I'm not quite sure why you want to base a studio around quarter-track decks. (If you sold those decks, you would have more than enough to set up one really good half-track deck.)

Of course you know that much 456 had sticky-shed. If you are setting up a home studio, ATR Master Tape is a wonder, and the RMG/Emtec 911 is supposed to be good as well. If your transport says "Studer" on it, you can use ATR's 1-mil MDS-36 tape which packs 3,400 feet on a reel.

My recommendation is to skip noise reduction, go half-track, and stick with studio machines. They are almost always much easier to work on, and designed for tens of thousands of hours of use. Get a studio machine, get an MRL tape, learn to align it, send the head block to John French for a dose of his magic, and you're off to the races.

WW
"Put on your high heeled sneakers. Baby, we''re goin'' out tonight.


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