Ultimate Home Recording Machines of the 80’s

Ah the ol “I was getting around to fixing it eventually”! Great post, merry chrimbus to you, hope to see more cool stuff from you in the next year! Cheers

I used to sell those Akai recorders from a pro music shop in Berkeley CA. We were the first Akai Professional dealer in the Bay Area, so we had their first products: the MG-1212, the S-612 Sampler, and the AX-80 and AX-60 keyboards. They also made a line of rack mount MIDI control boxes (like channel shift, velocity trim and a patch bay. Akai started out with the solid black control panels with gold lettering, but the next year changed to the beige “test instrument” look of the S-900 Sampler. The MG-1212 got an upgrade to the MG-1214. There was also an programmable eight-channel, rack-mounted, MIDI controlled analog mixer, but I can’t remember the model name.

The MG could have been a contender, except for one huge sticking point – it used a proprietary tape cartridge, available only through Akai and rather expensive. I was told by the Akai rep that the original plan was to have the MG-1212 work with a Betamax video tape cassette, which was affordable and easily available. But the licensing deal Akai tried to make with Sony fell through, because Sony didn’t like the idea of using their format to record side-by-side analog audio tracks, instead of the properly licensed helical-scan Betamax video system. Sticking an Akai MG audio tape into a Betamax VCR would make loud thumping noises and video chaos come out of your TV, and that scared Sony away.

So Akai had to come up with a slightly altered physical package for the cartridge, even though the internal mechanism was basically the same as Betamax. All so it wouldn’t fit into a VCR by accident!

I sold only a couple of these beasts, which is a shame because they sounded quite good with a simple, straightforward workflow. But the buyer would balk at the proprietary tape cartridge issue. If the damn machine had used Betamax tapes I could have sold dozens.

Joey,

“I was told by the Akai rep that the original plan was to have the MG-1212 work with a Betamax video tape cassette, which was affordable and easily available.”

A sales rep may have said this, but it’s not the truth. Akai had made a home video recorder, like a Beta, VHS, etc., in the late 70’s. They developed their own tape, the VT-300, for this system. It looked similar to a Beta tape. They also developed the tape transport for this. The MG1212 was based around this transport, which already existed, the tape shells were loaded with audio tape. For some reason, this story made the rounds. For some reason, some sales people made up their own version of this. I was the product manager for all the Akai products back then. I may have met you. Did you work at Leo’s? I knew Mark Haynes there.

Anyway, I just posted a training video for the MPX-820 that I did in 1987 on youtube. It can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvyS1zv6tNM

Mike McRoberts