"Newer" reel to reel recordings

[AndiiT]

Hi,
Excuse the title but let me explain, what is the newest/most up to date recording that you have ever encountered on a reel of tape?

The reason that I am asking is that whilst sorting through the mountain of tapes that I have amassed from car boot sales and which have come along with machines that I have purchased from various sources I found a tape which has some contemporary pop music on it dating from around 1996, although that was 19 years ago I would have thought that other forms of recording medium would have been much more "up to date" for music of that era.

We often see threads about the oldest recordings that people have encountered so in view of my find, I wondered if anyone has had a similar (or "newer") experience to mine?

Regards

Andrew

[ben]

I once bought a pile of tapes at a junk shop in Leicester that someone had compiled from various oldies CDs. I know that to be the case as many of the songs were 'orrible late 1980s synthesizer based re-recordings by one or two members out of the original groups!

[ricard]

I used reel-to-reel as my primary recording medium until 1999, both for ordinary off-the-air and off-vinyl/off-CD use, as well as in my home music studio. (At that time I switched to Minidisc for the former and hard disk recording for the latter).

Main reason was that I never liked the cassette format: too much noise without noise reduction, Dolby B never tracked well and Dolby C seemed to mess too much with the sound. In my opinion not until Minidisc had outgrown its teething problems with the compression algorithm was there a consumer recordable format with wide enough appeal which could rival reel-to-reel. Elcaset was a fringe format, and DAT only took off in the professional market.

[Gulliver]

I acquired a handful of reels in an eBay auction earlier this year which seem to have "party mix" music on them. I'm not familiar with most of the songs but I recognised a couple and googled them. Those songs came out in 2003 and 2006 so quite recently someone was using a RTR to provide party music. It ranged from the "banging beats" type of stuff to 2000's pop music. Not well recorded, saturated and the needle swinging into the red most of the time. My best guess was that some young person thought having an RTR putting out tunez at the house party would be cool.

Another reel had the audio from 1990s Star Trek episodes on it. Again I suspect a kid, though these were far better recorded.

[ricard]

Audio off the TV, that takes me back... I remember actually recording the audio off the TV when they broadcast Star Trek here in Sweden in the 1970's. I remember doing that with Space 1999 too. It was before home video recorders became common, so audio was the best I could do.

(In those days (I was around 10 or 11 or so) I (contrary to my posting above) actually used a cassette recorder, come to think of it. Didn't get into reel-to-reel until I was 12 or something when I bought a second hand Philips EL3547 for the equivalent of £3 (!) (In those days it was "only" 14 years old or so!) ).

Sorry for going a bit off topic ... just took me back ...

[Restoration73]

I have just recovered some programmes recorded off air Radio 2 on FM made in 1969, nice to hear rare output not recorded for posterity. Especially at 7.5ips.
Despite the existence of the digital audio workstation i.e. PC etc, I was still teaching reel to reel recording and editing on a course as late as 1997, using a Revox PR99 with excellent results - marking and cutting tape made people think carefully !

[Focus Diode]

Some 20 years ago I purchased a 5" reel of tape from a second hand stall. I expected to find recordings from the 1960s but no, there's brief Metro Radio 1986-1987 New Year's Eve from MW and the Top 20 from 1982, again from MW!

Brian

[Gulliver]

Recording audio....I remember recording the audio for episode 3-6 of the original airing of the TV series of The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I did it properly, to an old Grundig RTR at 3 3/4ips onto Realistic red box tape via cables soldered to the TV speaker (no mics). Egads I was 8 years old.

I recorded over the tapes when it was repeated a few years later, by which time we had a VHS machine.

Mostly I find recordings from the 60s or 70s.

[Nickthedentist]

Originally Posted by Gulliver

My best guess was that some young person thought having an RTR putting out tunez at the house party would be cool.

Or possibly a feed for an amateurish pirate radio station. There were vast numbers of these around on FM in the London area at the time.

[Timvintage]

Last year I bought a Sony Tc-377 reel to reel, along with 3 tapes. The guy I bought it from had owned it from new, but had thrown out a lot of his tapes due to sticky shed! One of the 3 tapes was a demo of his old band, recorded in a studio in the late 70s or early 80s, but the other 2 tapes were recordings from the radio in around 1997 or so. Content included the top 40 from radio 1, and also Paul McCartney live in concert recorded from radio 2! Another reel I came across in a batch from ebay had pop music from around 2006 or so. However, the majority of recordings I find on reel to reel tape are usually from the late 60s and early 70s.

[julie_m]

Don't forget that the first recordable CDs didn't appear until the mid-1990s, and the format did not start to become commonplace until about 1998. MiniDisc was no flop, but it was expensive. Cassette, having ironed out pretty much all its original shortcomings by the 1980s, was still the most prevalent form of recordable media; and would remain so, really, all the way through till the early 2000s.

Against that background, there were still plenty of old reel-to-reel recorders to be found in attics and cupboards, experimented with and sometimes persevered with; even if principally for novelty value, what with the performance of most of them -- exceptions probably being a few Revoxes, Ferrographs and others used mainly for listening to classical music -- not being on a par even with the cheapest "modern" kit.

[ricard]

Originally Posted by ajs_derby

Against that background, there were still plenty of old reel-to-reel recorders to be found in attics and cupboards, experimented with and sometimes persevered with; even if principally for novelty value...

That reminds me of a friend of mine; we took our respective reel-to-reel recorders (actually, his mother's, his mother was a teacher and in the 70's there were still language courses on reel-to-reel; my recorder was a bodged-up Philips EL3547 that I'd bought for £3) and made a tape loop round the legs of the ping pong table when we were 12 or 13 or so. Experimentation indeed.

[dave walsh]

I was still using reel to reel in the eighties as it was a way to archive longer radio broadcasts [or the occasional live gig with permission] without being so time limited eg 2 hours at 3.75 on a 2400 reel. I once recorded an all night Indian Music broadcast alternately switching from r to r to cassettes [auto reversible C120] with the aid of an alarm clock.When I realised that the new generation of VHS recorders coming in had better audio than my other recorders I used that tape medium for a while before CD and [LP] M Disc.

Nowadays, of course, people use a HD or one of many other devices with little time restriction. I often record audio on DVD[A] up to 8 hours with no loss of quality.

Dave W

[saxmaniac]

What do all the enthusiasts here do with their R 2 R machines? I have started using them after a gap of 30 years! There is something of the same psycology that makes us sad people prefer vinyl to digital; digital may be better but for some reason vinyl/cassette/R2R is the choice. I tried seeing a doctor about it but................

[dave walsh]

A fair enough question saxmaniac. It's "all in the mind" as they say. I use mine mainly to maintain access to my vintage tape recordings and also to check their condition but that's only occasional. I really need to try and digitise them but [ironically] magnetic tape has often turned out to be a better archiving medium [overall] than others in the end. I never wanted to be in the helpless position of complaining that I had nothing to play them back on

Clearly some people still prefer to do their original recording on R to R for reasons of perceived better quality, familiarity, retro interest etc but I've always assumed that must be a minority. A lot of it is just admiring the hardware I think, preserving and getting it going-especially if it's something that would have been out of reach in our early years. Analogue technology has actually got movement and working parts you can see in operation.

Overall though, it's the same story with other vintage technology as there are easily accessible modern alternatives for audio recording/TV watching and Radios etc The household appliances are probaly more directly used [if not just admired]. I don't think it's an issue just for Reel To Reel Tape Recorders. Many enthusiasts have more items than they could reasonably use anyway. There often seems to be more of an interest in finding and restoring the hardware as opposed to the actual medium that it was developed for. Many TV enthusiasts stick to vintage programming [on tape?] for example although older radios seem to be in fairly wide usage generally. Does anyone still have a Reel To Reel as part of their home audio set up? That was always a visually impressive living room feature!.
Dave W

[ricard]

For me reel-to-reel is a purely nostalgic medium. I do still have a Tandberg on a shelf connected to our stereo system, but it gets very little use in practice. I rarely make any recordings these days, using various digitial formats for that.

The odd time the Tandberg gets used for transcribing an old tape - particularly a bunch of 15 or 20 tapes that a friend of mine and I did sound-on-sound recordings on in our youth. Many hours of music material there. Now and then one of us thinks of an old song and I get it out. I don't really have the patience to transfer all the tapes in one go, and besides their Maxell UD most of them so will probably outlast any digital media I could transfer them too.

Last year, I transferred a bunch of tapes that my family sent back and forth across the Atlantic when I was young.

Mostly I enjoy getting out one of my 30+ machines from time to time, and listen to some old tape. I also enjoy 'fixing machines up', i.e. replacing the odd part here and there to keep them in running order, as opposed to 'restoring' a machine, which to me is more of a labour of love to get a machine in perfect order from a very sorry state, a treatment which I rarely feel the urge to give to machines these days.

I agree there is something special about not so much the sound itself but the whole appearance of a reel-to-reel recorder: the continous movement (reels turning slowly but surely, and at different speeds, always wondering at the end of a tape if it will actually be long enough this time or it will run off the end of the reel before the last song has finished, even though I know it won't...), the smell of warm grease, electronics and wood, the appearnce of the case and controls... Plus the knowledge that there's a lot of stuff inside the machine that collaborates to bring it all together.

To me, a tape machine represents the height of 1950's and 1960's home electronics technology. Televisions, sure, but they're all electronic and not as exciting. And tape machines have that magic ability to capture something for later enjoyment, whereas radios and televisions, marvels of their own, can only convey what someone else already has produced, while a tape recording, even if only a series of songs off the radio, to some extent captures and conveys the soul of the person who made the recording.

For some reason, I'm mostly fascinated by recordings for language schools and other similar institutions. I have a recording entitled 'counting excercises for abacus', which is basically someone reading sums for 30 minutes ... doesn't get a lot of listening hours I must admit though.

[dave walsh]

That's a perfect description of what I was trying to say ricard. Perhaps your use of Englsh is better, you are more emotional about r to r and archiving or both
I'm not sure about the Language School fixation though?

Dave W

[saxmaniac]

I think it sums up my views as well apart from the fact that when I have put time and money into restoring something then it's going to earn it's keep and get some use as well. I also detest the built-in obselescence of modern and particularly digital equipment. My very expensive Technics CD player was scrapped for lack of parts whereas a simpler machine can be repaired for far longer life. I will never spend serious money on digital equipment now

[ricard]

Originally Posted by dave walsh

I'm not sure about the Language School fixation though?

The language tape thing might be purely nostalgic, when I went to school here in Sweden, each classroom had a tape recorder, mainly for English language education, which was taught from grade three (age 9). The lessons were more or less stereotypically laid out, presented by two British people (usually a man and a woman; a well-known example of the former bore the to me slightly unbelievable name of Dennis Gotobed), often with a Swedish speaker appearing as a 'ghost voice' from time to time, to voice translations of new or difficult words.

"Good morning boys and girls, open your books please, open your books please, on page 15"

That kind of stuff scars you for life!

BTW (the question to which everyone really wants the answer to ), the recorders in question were in my day most often Tandberg 14's, with the occasional model 8 still hanging around. Not all schools used Tandbergs though, I've seen classroom recorders from other brands as well, usually (Swedish company) Luxor, or one of its rebranded versions, such as Skrivrit.

[Radio Wrangler]

The language lab at school and the tape/slide system in the main classroom taught me to speak French with an American accent...

Thank you, Harcourt, Brace, and World incorporated.

My chief contribution to science was the discovery that a piece of rubber tubing extracted from a standard bicycle pump flexible tube could be fitted over the capstan of the BSR TD2 deck in a language lab stall and would roughly double the tape speed. Skillful choice of when 'to play the joker' could cause great confusion! The game could be played the other way, starting doubled and then removing it.

Mon aeroglisseur

.........................Mon aeroglisseur

Mon aeroglisseur a plein d'angouilles

........................Mon aeroglisseur a plein d'angouilles.



David