[TIMTAPE]

Originally Posted by Nickthedentist

Our school had loads of these in a language lab in the late 1980s. They could rewind a C60 in about 10s flat, with the most amazingly even wind. It looked like a factory-fresh cassette. Solenoid controlled, student-proof, and amazing sound quality.

All thrown in a giant skip over one summer holiday apparently, and replaced with something newer.

In a way I agree with you both.

If you mean the 4 motor Tandberg Language Lab units, I managed to "rescue" a few many years ago before a large pallet of them went, I assume, to landfill.

They are impressive units, similar apparently to the high end Tandberg stereo cassette decks. Direct drive, tacho controlled reel motors, probably similar to the Revox 215 we were talking about in another thread. I think the wind is good because the tape speed and tension is well controlled. The wind is basically at constant tape speed rather than the take up core rotating at constant RPM. The weakness in the latter which is common on most cassette decks is that with constant RPM, as the pack diameter increases, the tape speed increases and the air cannot escape quickly enough to allow the arriving tape to sit firmly on the core, hence the lousy pack. The Tandberg automatically senses the speeds of both reel drives and regulates the RPM of the cores to prevent tape overspeeding. So it's smooth and fast but not too fast. At least that's been my experience. If ever I have a number of cassettes needing a good, smooth tape repack, done at reasonable speed, the old Tandberg deck works well in fast wind.

I think the main reason a "play wind" or library wind" usually results in such a smooth pack is that the capstan and pinch roller pay out the tape extremely smoothly so that the wind cant help but be smooth. I used to work with high speed cassette duplicators recording at speeds of up to 30 ips. The pack was still good at those reasonably high speeds.