What do YOU do with your reel to reel?

[alanwescoat]

Hi, I would like to start a discussion about how reel-to-reel owners use their players. Is it for playing factory-recorded music? Recording? Preservation of records? Reel-to-reel tape is the cleanest analog audio format I have ever heard. No rumble, clicks, or pops as with vinyl, and no tape hiss as with cassettes or 8-tracks. I can only wish that more factory recordings in this wonderful format were available to me. I'm looking forward to hearing from more experienced aficionados of this wonderful audio medium.

[brenellic2000]

I originally bought my first tape-recorder, a Marconiphone 4210, in about 1966, simply because my friends had tape-recorders; it seemed to be the thing to do! We used them for sound effects for ad hoc plays in our school English lessons - I also 'maintained' the school's new language laboratory and became hooked. My personal use at the time was for recording pop music off the BBC's "Top of the Pops" by putting a microphone infront of the screen - no one dared breathe! - or jazz off the radio. It progressed to copying my favourite music from LPs into compliations for continuous background music as I worked. Nothing at all professional, but it was fun.

I progressed to a Sony TC377 stereo and began recording interviews for my books and then went mad collecting British tape-recorders! Today, I mainly use a Revox A77 Mk.1 for recording local history lectures for reference in my writing. Of course, a cassette deck can do the job just as well, but open reel decks give far more pleasure and become a conversation piece at the lectures!

Barry

[SeanStevens]

If I had two reel-to-reels I would use them to produce 'frippatronics'! A very interesting effect.

SEAN

[Roger13]

Hi.

I got hooked on reel to reel when our school music master produced a huge Ferrograph from his office, to record a school band concert. I was completely mesmerised and, although I was not allowed to touch said Ferrograph I WANTED one from that day forward. Couldn't afford one though so with a little financial assistance from my dad I bought a Wyndsor machine. My dad and I agreed that it sounded dreadful (muffled) so I took it back to the shop and came away with a lovely little ULTRA 6202 4 track mono. I used that little machine constantly for about ten years and it never put a foot wrong. I used it mainly for copying records (naughty) and recording the BBC's 'Challenging Brass' and 'Listen to the Band' broadcasts. If only I had kept those recordings - even the beeb don't have copies of the Challenging Brass programmes.

I moved on to an Akai 4000D stereo and stuck with it for some years, still recording radio etc until I struck up a love affair with cassette, and then Minidisc.

I have now seen the light and gone back to collecting and rejuvinating R/R machines, of which I now have eight and another on the way.

I have tried lots of different machines including the respected Revox, although my experiences with that marque ( 2 x A77's and a B77 ) have not been good. I found them to be 'Prima Donna's', always needing this or that tweaked to perform well. Just unlucky I guess - one A77 chose the night of a live orchestral/choral recording to go 'belly up'. Just as well I had wired my Pro Walkman into the circuit as a backup! Can't help thinking my 4000D would have just got on and done the business............

I use my R/R's all the time and I find that recording a CD onto tape actually improves the final listening experience. That said, with all the R/R's qualities of which there are many, for seamless editing and great effects the PC, together with Sony's 'Sound Forge' software, is pretty much impossible to beat.

Cheers,

Roger.

[pcawthron]

My interest in R2R goes back to being a small child in the very early 60s when a fairly-well off uncle had a custom hi-fi cabinet with turntable, tuner and R2R. The tuner and R2R were mounted horzontally to match the turntable.

My R2Rs are used for playing quadraphonic commercial tapes but they are hard to get in the UK. I just missed out on a quad. Dolby tape of Deep Purple's "Stormbringer" - it sold for £101 in the US.

For fun I convert some CD-4 quadraphonic vinyl to tape but this also preserves the vinyl.

R2R was the best quad. format, sometimes called Q4 amongst the fans to differentiate from quad. 8-tracks known as Q8. I also have an Akai quad. 8-track player/recorder.

My working machines are a Tascam 32B with DX-4D noise reduction and a Teac A-3440 with RX-9 noise reduction. Both of these were released after the quad. era but are ideal for the job.

For commercial stereo tapes at 3¾ ips I have a Teac A-4300, and for fun I have an Otari MX-55N half-track machine.

Regards,

Peter

[AndiiT]

Hi,
The few reel to reel machines that I now have (Grundig TK14 and TK146, Tandberg Series 15 - 2, Akai 4000D and GX4000D, Marconi 4202, I think and Elizabethan LZ29/L) are occasionally used for recording longer radio programmes. I still don't trust these new fangled hard drive recorder things (PVR's) despite having a couple of them in the house and also a computer which is more than capable of recording radio broadcasts.

Generally I will set the PVR or computer to record the radio broadcast and also connect one of the machines to the Grundig Yacht Boy as a form of backup.

The machines are also occasionally used to copy friends Vinyl on to tape with the intention of eventually ripping it on to my PC so that I can add the album (or whatever) to my Mp3 player; Tape doesn't jump when it is knocked like vinyl does and when you have an inquisitive Labrador about I find it best to transfer to tape first before ripping .

Just for the record (no pun intended) the first machine we had was a Fidelity Playmaster, which like many other machines, was used excessively for recording the top 20 on a Sunday evening.

I have enclosed a picture of one of my recent ripping events, involving some interesting 78's

Andrew

[Bumblebee]

I also got into R2R back in the late 60's, when my brother had a Elizabethan LZ34. He gave it to me after he got married and had blown it up. I fixed it then like a idiot I throw it away, one of the worst thing I could have done. Been trying to find another one for over 20 years. My Mom and Dad brought me a Sony TC 272 for a christmas present back in 1971. In the last 10 years I have been given a few, some worked, some didnt they do now tho. I like the sound that they give, better than this digital stuff. I have on one of the reel's Fleetwood Mac live with Peter Green, so that is going back 40 years.

[Paulus.d]

I got into R2R back in the early 70's when my Dad brought one to play his old tapes - it was a Sound Riviera / BSR generic type. But, as always he was not satisfied with the sound and brought another, it may have been a Westminster with the BSR deck. He choose the first one and gave me the second one. I guess since then I've had 15-20 of these machines, not knowing about changing caps and things at the time, when one died, I would just get another!

I still use them in the way I did back then - taping radio and making mixed tapes for listening to while working, my latest machines are the Elizabethan LZ-29, LZ-34 and Tandberg Series 15-41. Some how the running sounds of the motors, even in the TD2 BSR deck, mixed with the heat from the valves is a comfort to me reminding me of past times...I prefer the sound of them and nothing beats one for carrying to a room, plugging and playing - even in these days of MP3, CD's and blu-rays I love my R2R's more and spend time recording digital stuff to tape.

Regards Paul

[Michael Maurice]

I got into tape recording, very young when dad bough the Korting which is pictured on my avitar.

The Korting got very abused by me, I was only about 13 at the time, and gave way to an Philips EL3302 cassette recorder, good but not in anyway as good as the Korting.

I recorded and kept some lovely radio programmes such as Pick of the Pops and Junior choice.

then I bought an Akai 4000DS which was OK, but not very reliable, then the Revox A77 dolby, a Revox B77 HS and lately an A700.

I do ocasionally playback old tapes or I use it for transfering tapes to computer.

Going back to the Korting. In its heyday, Mum and Dad used to frequent a certain Greek restaurant which had live music, and Dad used to take the recorder along and record the band.

One of the vocalists became a famous Greek singer. I still have the tapes and recently digitised them and put them onto CD's for my Mum on her 75th Birthday.

Maybe one day I'll contact the singer and ask if she remembers my parents 9she may well do as dad got her and the other musicians to make recordings for the BBC) and tell her I still have those wonderful tapes.

In the last few years thanks to Ebay, I bought some Kortings from the United states and Germany and restored Dads old tape recorder. alison (my wife0 wont let me keep it in our living room (why cant they ever appreciate the finer things in life) so It lives in my workshop and every so often I get it out and play a tape or two.

[Lodgesound]

I first got a reel to reel given to me by a family friend as a child of 7 in the mid-seventies. It was a Sony TC 357-4 and it gave me many hours of pleasure. I remember taking it apart to look inside and wondering even as a 7 year old why it did'nt have more than 1 motor in the transport and was hooked from then on. From the age of 7 and a bit I remember reading about and wanting a Studer A80 (did'nt hurt to dream - at the time the machine cost what my parents house was worth!).

Fast forward 11 years and I got a job at BBC Television as a video recording operator using enourmous open reel 1" and 2" VTR's. Very soon afterwards through contacts I developed I bought a Nagra T audio and an Otari MTR12. By the mid 1990's I owned a collection of 5 open reel 1" C Format Sony VTR's which I still own today all of which work and are in regular use as the market for archive video transfers is quite active just now. The Nagra and the Otari also see regular use and when paired up with Dolby SR (thanks to ebay!) sound like no other sound equipment I have ever owned.

I still love open reel machines every bit as much as I did when i was 7 (I'm 42 now) and although my skills and television experience are utterly redundant in today's workplace (I earn less money now then I did at the age of 22!) I'm still fortunate enough to have a job where I use and maintain these beasts professionally.

[Bumblebee]

Like Paulus.d, I have put some of my cd's onto tape. I started with Pink Floyd Dark side of the moon, when I listened to it on cd, there seemed to be something missing. So I put on to tape and it sounded how it should sound. I have been told, (whether this is true or not I dont know) that recording studios are going back to using tape. As band's say can't get the sound thay want with digital.
Bumbleebee.
(Mark)

[Nickthedentist]

My only reel-to-reel machine was a cheapo late 1960s Portadyne using the BSR TD2 deck.

It cost 50p from a jumble sale in about 1983. Like Michael, I also had a cassette recorder, but this thing sounded so much better, in part because of the much more powerrful amp and bigger speaker.

I used to record absolutely anything that interested me from the radio, including news items that I thought might be noteworthy in the future (the end of the miners' strike was one). I also made an amusing collection of "cock-ups" including one from the late 1980s on Radio 3 where the continuity announcer spilled his tea into the mixing desk. 5 minutes of silence followed then he re-appeared sounding flustered and out of breath, to explain that he'd had to run to another studio. The Schubert piano works resumed... for about 10 seconds, when the CD player started skipping and so on. Then he changed machine and the wrong disc was played etc. etc. Wish I still had it.

Sadly, the machine and tapes were abandoned in a house move about 15 years ago.

Nick.

[ppppenguin]

In my teens I had a rather nasty 3 speed Fidelity open reel. It worked and I had a quite a lot of fun with it. I currently have a Tandberg 64X and Revox B77 MkII HS. Both lovely machines but neither gets used now apart from occasional dubbing of old tapes.

For real life recording these days it's difficult to imagine using anything other than a computer or solid state recorder. Ease of use, cost of tape, reliability, consitency and sound quality. If you want the particular distortions of tape because you like the sound then it's easy enough to use a 3 head machine to post-process in real time or even put it in the main recording chain.

This ignores the nostalgia element which is a large part of why most of us are here.

[Paulus.d]

Hopefully your old Portadyne & tapes inspired someone else to follow us into this retro music format, Nick!

I used to tape TV themes, Radio 1's top 20 on a Sunday, make up strange little stories etc Funny thing is, since fixing the Tandberg, it's become THE favorite machine and I've started to re-create some of my past works again.

As Bumblebee said, I also heard Studio's are now feeding newly recorded music into R2R machines and then re-recording back into the system to give it an analogue warmth!
Also the thing with me is all of my machines are mono - so any stuff recorded from radio or PC is converted to mono - is that the thing I like about it even when I had a Sony Tc-200, stereo with 2 detatchable speakers is was not good enough. The Philips stereo decks were not what I wanted because of the external amp.

Regards Paul

[SeanStevens]

http://www.harsmedia.com/Amphibious/...s/sigsym2.html

This is how Frippatronics works using any two r2r players

It is worth trying

SEAN

[ricard]

I grew up with a reel to reel tape recorder (a Butoba MT5 battery operated machine) that my father had bought in the early 60's. (The reason he bought a battery operated machine was not for portability, but because the building he was living in has DC mains!). That particular machine was sadly taken to bits, but it left me with an interest in recording in general and reel-to-reel recorders in particular.

In the 70's as a youngster I bought a number of machines second hand at various times, including a Philips EL3547 and Tandberg models 3B and 84, finally culminating when I was 15 when my parents bought me a Tandberg 9141X. I used that machine for many years for all sorts of recording tasks, including lots of sound-on-sound recordings (music being another one of my hobbies). It was replaced for music use in 1999 when I got a digital 8-track recorder instead. The 9141X is now my main transcription machine whenever I need to transcribe reel-to-reel to other media (which is very seldom though).

These days I see tape mainly as a nostalgic media. I use Minidiscs for field recording, a digital 8-track recorder (a Korg D8) for music multi-tracking, and CD's and MP3's for general listening. While tape can sound sweet, tape hiss and dropouts are like surface noise and crackle on LP's, and I find it annoying. Especially the dropouts.

That said, I do listen to reel-to-reel now and again, and I have several tapes of modern recordings that I've copied to tape just so I can listen to it in that format. Vintage recording equipment (like vintage radio) provides a whole spectrum of experience which goes beyond the sound: the look, smell and feel of older equipment I find very satisfying.

I have a modest collection of machines, mostly from the 1955-1975 period, which includes a number of Butobas, several Tandbergs, some Philips, a Grundig, a Brenell and others. I try to concentrate on two-track machines these days as they are more forgiving of tape-to-head issues, but I've got a number of four-track machines around as I have lots of four-track tapes. Sometimes I find tapes in thrift shops, and it's usually fun to listen to them, and most often they are four track.

I've even managed to mangle a couple of machines in at work; I work for a company that makes network surveillance cameras, and the smooth slow turning of tape reels is an ideal image source for verifying proper delivery of network image data.

/Ricard

[Jimmyhaflinger]

my first reel to reel was a 1964 Uher 4000 report-S, my uncle bought it for me in a scrapyard in 1992 when i was 13, it came in a suitcase along with 6 reels of tape, a PSU and a microphone, and it basically worked.

The reels alone were an amazing find, they were packed with off-air recordings of "Tio-i-Topp" from about 1971 to 1973, Tio i Topp was a famous Swedish pop music radio show hosted by Kaj Kindvall.

I listened to those six reels over and over and this really introduced me to the wonderful world of early 70s "bubblegum" and country-tinged pop music!

[alanwescoat]

Thanks to all who responded.

[Michael Maurice]

Originally Posted by Jimmyhaflinger

The reels alone were an amazing find, they were packed with off-air recordings of "Tio-i-Topp" from about 1971 to 1973, Tio i Topp was a famous Swedish pop music radio show hosted by Kaj Kindvall.

I listened to those six reels over and over and this really introduced me to the wonderful world of early 70s "bubblegum" and country-tinged pop music!

I wonder whether there are enthusiasts in Sweden that collect these radio shows in the same way that some of us collect recordings of the late Alan Freeman's Pick of The Pops.

[theoldtrout]

I’m pleased to hear that R-R tape recording is alive and well. I bought my first tape recorder from a junk shop in the early 1960’s, can’t remember what make it was but it had 3” reels, more of a dictating machine; I used to tape TOTP with it, and sing into it - I thought I was the next Janis Joplin! A neighbour gave me a broken Collaro studio decked recorder, it had a mono valve amp; I repaired it, converted it to stereo and used it for quite a few years. I then went through various machines including Tanberg and an old Ferrograph to an Akai 4000DS and then [the holy grail for me] a second hand Revox B77. I used the Revox to record concerts from the radio and did some good recordings - using cross-paired microphones - of an old school friend’s string quintet and a friend's jazz band. The Revox was damaged when 5ft of sea water moved me out of my flat one night and then stolen before I could recover it! I bought another 4000DS, used it for quite a few years then sold when times were hard. About ten years ago I pulled a TASCAM 32-2B from a skip, repaired it and used it ever since to record jazz, orchestral and opera from an fm radio tuner, sometimes to dub onto cassette. The Tascam is getting temperamental and due for a service when I find the time.