First complete tape recorder?

[brenellic2000]

Though I'd played with my friends' Fidelity Playmatics and Elizabethan LZs in the very early 1960s, my own 'first tape-recorder' was a superb Marconiphone 4210 1/4 track mono followed by a brilliant Sony TC377 stereo, followed by a Revox A77 Mk.I. Then I fulfilled my dream collecting Brenells (every one of them!) to write the Brenell history.. followed by Truvoxes, some Ferrographs and other superb British oddities like the MSS, Gaumont-British and TRD-Hartley....

Good though the TC377 was, the Revox A77 is still, I believe, the best all rounder, but for sheer listening pleasure and quality you can't beat a good Brenell IC-2000, can you Colin?!!! Ouch!

TTFN
Barry

[Sideband]

Mine was a Philips EL3527. That had a monoknob and worked the mechanics via bowden cables. I used to record Pick of the Pops every week directly from our Ferguson 383A radio that had been fitted with a line out socket. One advantage of this machine is that it could be used as an amplifier without the motor running so it doubled up as a record player when connected to a UA15 deck.

My first real Hi Fi machine was an Akai 4000DS which I bought in 1974 and later sold in 1980.


Rich.

[peter_scott]

I think my first tape recorder was a Walter which had a knob on a stick, that
protruded from a + shaped hole, for tape transport control. It also had a permanent magnet erase head that swivelled into place as required. I can't remember why I got it (i.e. what was wrong with it) but I never got it to work correctly so I suppose my real first tape recorder came next.

I decided to construct one from a Collaro Studio deck and an off the shelf tape recorder chassis from one of the Lasky's type shops of the day. I'm ashamed to say that I built it into the bottom half of an HMV 1805 console
tele that I had also failed to fix. (That had been my first television. A non-working gift from a local radio shop. I was 14 I think.) The tape recorder worked OK but its performance was disappointing on anything other than 7.5 ips.

Peter

[Sideband]

Just remembered another recorder that I had briefly. It was a home built job based on the Mullard circuit from the same book that described the 5-10 and 5-20. It had a BSR deck fitted and used a joystick type control for tape functions. Did anyone else have one of these (possibly with a different deck)?



Rich.

[csp]

My first recorder was a Rola 66 Mk1, that I borrowed from my school in 1953 for the long Christamas holidays. During the holidays the Education Dept decided to close the school and we were all transferred to about three other schools.

On returning to my new school I returned the recorder, but the "powers to be" new nothing about it and for me to take it home again until they sorted things out.

It never went back to the school despite my asking on a number of occassions what to do with it.

David

[TIMTAPE]

David,
I guess you've seen Peter O'Neill's site which has a fair bit of historical stuff on the Aussie Rola/Byer/Plessey machines, including some rare models. In the 60's here in Perth they seemed to be in every AM radio station. I used to drool over them as a kid.
A friend of mine has a collection of them.

Tim

[csp]

Tim,

I have not seen Peter O/Neill's web site, can you supply the URL.

During the 50's and 60's, I would have said that either the "66" or the later "77" WERE the Australian broadcasting industry standard.

It proves that the old AWA could/did make some world class products and it's a shame that all of this technology and knowledge disappeared.

The "66" that I by default became the proud owner of, stayed with me for many years and was even used by me in my first recording studio that I opened around 1963. In fact I think it might have used it as part of the recording process for a number of songs that went on to become world famous by one of the world's greatest "pop' groups.

I stopped using it when I purchased my TEAC recorder and today I really have no idea what became of the old machine, except that I no longer have it.

David

[TIMTAPE]

David, this is the link for the Australian Byer stuff. Hope I got it right.

http://users.chariot.net.au/~debpeter/

Cheers Tim

[timotheus]

my own 'first tape-recorder' was a superb Marconiphone 4210 1/4 track mono
Barry

Barry - I just happened to come across this browsing the web. I had one of these in the mid-60s. It had surprisingly good sound, but running at full speed it was very noisy mechanically - there was a lot of machinery clattering around in there. It also tended to run slightly slow - at least half a semitone, although it got slightly better having warmed up for half an hour!

The carrying handle was attached to the side of the wooden casing only: it was a heavy beast and I always visions of the box splitting apart and all the innards landing on the floor ...

Am I right in thinking there were HMV and Ferguson equivalents? Maybe even Ultra.

It was a good attempt but didn't quite come off compared to contemporary Grundigs, Philips etc. What do you think?

I chucked the Marconiphone into a skip in 1973 - seems a terrible shame looking back: they must have been quite expensive to manufacture.

Cheers

Tim

[Roger13]

"I chucked the Marconiphone into a skip in 1973 - seems a terrible shame looking back: they must have been quite expensive to manufacture."

Oh my god, how do you sleep at night....?

Cheers,
Roger.

[Electric-Hair]

mmmm.....reel to reel was a bit before my time, though they were making them for a few more years. Do they still make them and why not? Well, it was the cassette that I grew up whith and started off whith the teac cassette and a bit later a teac 144 portastudio. Its the computer thats got me back into it. My first reel to reel is only recent - the 1967 Grundig TK245 automatic whith magic eye Iv picked up a few Akai since and Im hooked. Cannot see why no one would be making them? Somehow I don't think they would be too dificult to manufacture. You could use a VHS machine instead which would be a lot cheaper and simpler, but it does not seem to beat the reel to reel. I do seem to remember there was multitrack VHS for a short period of time, but not now.....mmmm....anyway

[timotheus]

Originally Posted by Roger13

"I chucked the Marconiphone into a skip in 1973 - seems a terrible shame looking back: they must have been quite expensive to manufacture."

Oh my god, how do you sleep at night....?

Cheers,
Roger.

I'm wracked by remorse. Also in a skip at about the same time was a Vortexion belonging a friend of my father. If you touched one of the the controls with one hand, and you had your other hand on a radiator, you got electroconvulsive therapy for free. Now that really was heavy. (If I remember correctly it had the same deck as a Ferrograph.) The sound was garbage for some reason, but that might have been user error ...

[Heatercathodeshort]

Mine was a second hand SOUND 777 in 1962. My mother paid £10.00 for it and I paid her back over a few weeks. It had the Studio Collaro deck and worked very well. My first new machine which I still own is a Marconi [Thorn] four track model dating from 1967 and is still working well today. Thorn manufactured superb tape recorders using a similar deck arrangement that never gave any trouble. I owned loads of recorders including a strange EMI model with solenoid brakes. Regards, John.

[brenellic2000]

Hi Tim!

Yes indeed, the Thorn group decks were surprisingly good - the four badge engineered marques were - Freguson, HMV, Marconiphone and Ultra, each aimed at different clientelle. The Newhaven works produced all four in a bid to out perform Philips and Grundig in terms of production output but in the end, dealers were not happy at stocking identical models and as cheaper Japanese decks became available, Thorn wound down UK built decks and adoped Sanyo decks as they moved over to cassettes!

[rtbcomp]

The first one I had was in 1968 and was a small battery operated thing. Since then I've had an Akai and a Ferrograph, the type you found in schools. I think mine was ex-government, it had an ultrasonic oscillator that fed a coil which straddled the tape. I was told that this was a device to mark the tape to show up any editing.

I bought a BSR deck in the late '60s with a view to building my own machine along the lines of the Heathkit model. I recently Freecycled this.

I have just got a Philips N4504 off Freecycle, seems to work OK.

[Kat Manton]

Hi,

The first machine that was actually mine would be a Series 4 Ferrograph, appropriated by slightly devious means from school in 1983. Over the summer holidays I'd been asked to take a look at a sizable pile of accumulated tape recorders, record players, amplifiers, radios, etc. I was to identify what worked and what didn't, fix what I could; no monetary reward was offered but I was told, "what you can't fix, you're welcome to have for parts."

When it came to the Ferrograph, "It doesn't work, it looks like there are some parts missing from the deck; here, I'll show you..."

So, it came home with me that day... along with the "missing" parts...

I still have it; it still works but could do with a thorough overhaul now. Since then, others have been added to the collection. The Leevers-Rich Proline 2000 I intercepted on its way to a skip is a prized possession, as is the Vortexion W.V.B. I've yet to start work on.

There are arguably "better" machines but my object of lust and desire is the Vortexion C.B.L. 6. I'm not sure why; maybe the Ferrograph started off a fascination with the Wearite deck and I see the C.B.L. as the ultimate machine to use it?

Cheers, Kat

[rronaldson]

My first tape recorder was a Wyndsor Vanguard ... large and very heavy. It was a quarter track mono machine but had an unamplified tapping for the "other" channel to a socket so that you could playback in stereo, with a suitable pre-amplifier for that channel, through a hi-fi system. Later I replaced that mono jack socket with a stereo one and fitted a pre-amp so I had a stereo output from the machine. I still have it but the drive wheel on the motor now resembles sticky toffee so it's unusable.

[Phil G4SPZ]

My first tape recorder - more a toy, really, but I still have it and it still works - was a second-hand Japanese "Miny Transistor" battery-operated portable which took 3" reels, had two motors and rim drive (no capstan). I was about 12, and I used to record my favourites off Pick of the Pops... Long Wave quality, no capstan; oh the sound we used to put up with in those days!

I later modified it by adding remote start-stop and various direct inputs and outputs. I've still got some old off-air recordings of Radio Caroline in 1967. The Miny later saw use as a pre-fade listen headphones amplifier in the mobile disco I ran as a teenager. These machines still turn up at the NVCF for silly money!

At the risk of waffling, I later was given a Walter 505. My first proper hi-fi tape recorder was a Goodmans SCD100 top-loading cassette deck which I bought with my first wage packet. I still have the Goodmans, but it's faulty and in the to-do pile.

Phil

[Geoff 555]

Hello mine was a Brennel in 1959, you know the 'portable' one, it was a fare old lump. I still have it and it works well. I 'repaired' it about 12 years ago as the heads were showing signs of wear. They were rubbed down with wet and dry finishing with 1200 grade, then a polish. Ignorance is bliss sometimes, the things we ( or I rather) have done.
Ducks the bricks and flying objects.
Cheers.
Geoff.

[Paulus.d]

I had a...Not sure on make but had a 2 valve amp - ecc83 and ecl86 - and a BSR td2 deck. It used to make a loud feedback sound which I traced to the ecl86 having a loose pin which broke off eventually!!! also the main spring snapped as well.
After that came a Tandberg series 15 4 track which died then my trusty Elizabethan LZ34, a Sony Tc-200 and now a Philips N4504 with bad belts!

Paulus