Tag: tape machines

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Stephens Electronics, maker of the 40-track analog multitrack machine (1973)

Stephens_40_track_1973Commercially-released albums were made on 24-track tape machines for a very long period of time, approximately 1971 – 1995.  Now, before 24-track machines were available there was always the possibility of ping-pong’ing, which can get you 8 solid-sounding tracks on a 4-track machine (and at least 20 on an 8-track) , and at some point in the 70s engineers were able to lockup two 24-track machines to get, I imagine, 46 tracks of audio plus timecode.  But as early as 1973, Stephens Electronics of Burbank offered another solution: a 40-track, 30 IPS 2″ tape machine that still promised 40 – 2oK response.  Users of these machines apparently included Leon Russell and Roy Thomas Baker; can anyone positively confirm any well-known records that were made on the Stephens 40-track?

A helpful dude has made the original Stephens catalog/spec sheet available online; click here to download the PDF (not my link).

Let’s get back to that advert tho…  WTF is going on here?

moodyPensive lady

draggingDrags 132lb tape deck along beach

GreekNonsensical ‘greek’ placeholder copy tells us nothing

headlineHeadline hails the freaks

Aphrodite FowlerThere’s clearly some sort of Venus/Aphrodite metaphor at work here, but what exactly IT ALL MEANS remains a mystery (at left, a painting of Aphrodite by Fowler).  I could find one other similar-period Stephens advert, and it’s a little quirky, but not as bizarre as beach-lady.

Stephens_ad_1974Any of y’all using these machines nowadays?

Many former Stephens users report that the machines compare well to Studer and Ampex in terms of sonics.  They were also designed for utmost mechanical and electronic reliability; designer John Stephens apparently had a background in aerospace engineering.  The machines seem to be few and far between these days, commanding prices well above that of similar vintage Studers.

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Magnetic Film Recording (1953)

The Hallen Corp magnetic film-recorder circa 1953.  A bargain at $13,000! (adjusted for inflation)

The Stancil-Hoffman magnetic-film recorder circa 1953.

Everyone (that reads this website…) is aware that magnetic wire recording gave way to magnetic tape recording, which gave way to magnetic discs, which are currently being slowly phased-out in favor of motionless ‘solid-state’ memory (via i-am-typing-this-on-maybe-my-last-macbook-that-will-have-a-spinning-harddrive).  Progress is rarely purely sequential though, and just as there was the short-lived metal-tape recorder of the 1930s (see this previous post for info), the Ampex/Magnecord dominated early magnetic-tape era was challenged (for fidelity, at least) by magnetic film recorders.  Aside from their heavy endorsement from Fine Recording, I don’t know much about these machines.  Are any still in use?  What made them superior to magnetic tape, and why?  Let us know…

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Magnecord

Tape!

I have an upcoming session with an artist who wants to keep the album all live, very raw.  I am expecting it will be a fun session.  The material has a classic RnB/blues vibe, so I am considering running some live mixes to GCR‘s circa 1950 Magnecord PT6 along with the Pro Tools multitrack.  But which brand of ancient 1/4″ tape to use?  Perhaps these circa 1952 audiotape ads will help decide the issue…

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Magnecord

Magnecord Tape Machines used for early stereo experimentation

Above: an unpublished photo from the collection of David Hall, courtesy T. Fine.

T. Fine: “Bert Whyte was an early Magnecorder dealer located on Long Island NY. He was also an early enthusiast for making 2-channel staggered-head binaural recordings. Whyte was a friend of Bob Fine, the engineer responsible for the Mercury Living Presence single-mic mono recordings in the early 1950’s. Fine and David Hall (Mercury’s recording director at the time) let Whyte tag along on several recording trips to Chicago and Minneapolis, where Whyte made experimental 2-mic binaural recordings for his own personal use and to demonstrate the abilities of the Magnecorder. This photo shows White and his binaural rig in the front of Bob Fine’s recording truck. In the foreground at left is a portion of one of the two Fairchild full-track mono recorders used to make the Mercury recordings. Photo date is likely 1952 or 1953.

Bert Whyte went on to write an influential record-review column for Radio & TV News, later Electronics magazine. He was also a founder of Everest Records, where he oversaw engineering and recording of the well-regarded Everest classical records. After Everest went out of business, Whyte returned to journalism, writing for Audio Magazine from the 1960’s until Audio ceased publication. Whyte also continued to engineer and produce records over the years. Probably his best-known later recordings were the direct-to-disc records made for Crystal Clear Records in the late 70’s. At the Crystal Clear D2D recording of Virgil Fox, a parallel recording was made using the prototype Soundstream digital recorder. Those recordings were later released on CD, titled “The Digital Fox.” Whyte was an early enthusiast of digital recording, praising the Sony PCM-F1 recorder in the pages of Audio Magazine. He ran PCM-F1 backups of his direct-to-disc recordings in London, also for Crystal Clear Records.”

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Audio Manipulation Technologies c. 1956: Radio SFX

From Radio And Television News, 2/56: a short article concerning the creation of sound effects for use in radio commercials, AKA., radio ‘spots.’  The focus here is on creating special-effects (pitch shifting, echo, filter effects, etc) through direct physical manipulation of the tape-recorder (as opposed to utilizing additional outboard equipment).

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The Tascam Series 40 tape machines of the 1980s

Download the complete twelve-page Tascam Series 40 catalog, c. 1984:

DOWNLOAD: Tascam40series1984

Products covered, with extensive text, specs, and photos, include: Tascam 42 1/4″ stereo tape machine, Tascam 44 four-track 1/4″ tape machine, and Tascam 48 1/2″ eight-track tape machine.

above: Tascam’s various data recorders of the early eighties. 21-track 1/2″ anyone?

Tascam helped create the category of ‘home-recording-studio’ in the 1970s with their 4-track reel to reel machines.  The 3440, Teac 3340, and Tascam 40-4 and 80-8 tape machines were the backbone of thousands of home studios and project studios.  This line-up was improved in the 1980s with the introduction of the Series 40.  The Tascam 42, 44, and 48 tape machines offered better performance than the older models, plus standard features such as balanced i/o, varispeed, and confidence monitoring (IE, they are all three-head decks).  The battleship-grey finish of the series 40 lets you know that these are commercial/industrial machines, and the 70/80 lb weight reinforces that idea.   (N.B. – Tascam also offered a series 50 with even better specs; i have no direct experience with these machines tho…)

The Tascam 48

Many years ago I inherited a couple dozen pro reel-to-reel machines from a media company that had updated to DAT.  Otari 50/50s, Tascam 22s and 32s, Technics 1500s, etc…  The best unit of the bunch was a Tascam 44.   The operational characteristics and sonics of that machine were incredible.  It is long gone now, like all the others, sacrificed to pay-the-rent in late 90’s Williamsburg.   It’s one of the few studio pieces that I really regret selling.  I don’t think I would ever go back to analog tape as a working production format, but as an effect of sorts analog tape has a quality that nothing else can deliver.  Just yesterday I was in the studio with E’s Marantz dual-cassette deck, bouncing some submixes onto a Type 1 Sony cassette and then back into Pro Tools, trying to get just the right amount of high and low end breakup.  I got it right after about ten attempts with different level settings.  A three-head machine would have been very useful in that situation… especially one with varispeed.

Anyone still using a Tascam 44 or 48 for music production?  Drop a line and let us know…

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Magnecord

UPDATED: The Very Early Magnecord SD-1 Wire Recorder

Courtesy of PS dot com reader H. Layer come these images of his Magnecord SD-1 wire recorder.  Magnecord ran a respectable second to Ampex in the development and proliferation of professional audio-tape recorders in the Unites States in the 1940s and 1950s.  You can find a tremendous amount of information regarding the various Magnecord tape machines on PreservationSound.com (you might want to start here), as well as many recent recordings that I have made with my Magnecord PT6 machines.  Anyhow, it is a small but important footnote in Magnecord history that their first attempt at a recording device was not a tape recorder but instead a wire recorder.  H. Layer relates the following:

“Years ago I acquired Magnecord’s only wire recorder, the SD-1.  After considerable research, I found out that Russ Tinkham (Ed: one of the four founders of Magnecord INC) was retired and living quite close to me …he was delighted to see the SD-1 after many decades and we became good friends. Photo of my SD-1 attached.”

SD-1 aspect fixed_B_100LAbove: helpful reader Art Shifrin provides come additional information concerning the SD-1.

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Publications

Unusual Techniques In Sound Recording (1950)

Download a four-page article from ‘Radio Electronics’ magazine 5/1950 entitled “Unusual Techniques In Sound Recording” (Richard H. Dorf):

DOWNLOAD: Unusual_Techniques_Sound_Recording_Dorf_1950

The article is primarily concerned with studio-editing applications of the then-novel ‘magnetic tape recording’ technology, with some interesting bits regarding techniques for capturing greater dynamic range in disc-recording.  Article was researched at Reeves Sound Studios in NYC, a five-floor facility that seems to have been primarily a sound-for-picture studio but which hosted at least one commercially-released Coltrane session.  Reeves used Fairchild 30 ips tape machines which look very similar to the industry-standard Ampex 300s of the era.

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Magnecord

Magnecord Historical Archive Material Part VI

Today we’ll wrap up our series of original-source documents pertaining to Magnecord corporation, one of the pioneers of high-fidelity recording.

Click each link below to download the corresponding issue of ‘Magnecord INC,’ the company’s in-house publication.

Magnecord_INC_jan1953

Magnecord_INC_Nov1953

Magnecord_INC_Sept1953

Magnecord_INC_July1954

Magnecord_INC_may1954

As I noted earlier in this series, these documents are fascinating because they reveal a culture beginning to grasp the potential of affordable, widely accessible audio-recording.  Each issue of ‘Magnecord, INC’ describes what were essentially new-ideas as far as recording and playing-back sound in various artistic and commercial/industrial applications.  Consider the example above: the New Haven fire dep’t circ 1951.  Notice that there is no mention in this piece about enhancing public health and/or safety: here, the Magenecorder is being used to “..protect() the city and the fire department against complaints.”  While I am not saying that this was the birth of ‘PYA,’ aka, ‘Protect Your Ass,’ it’s certainly an example of an early milestone.  “This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes.”  Here’s where it began…

So many tape recorders.  So much tape.  So much to record.

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Magnecord

Magnecord Historical Archive Material: Part V

Continuing the thread from yesterday’s post: here are the 1952 issues of Magnecord, INC.  Click on the link to download each issue.

Magnecord_INC_Jan1952

Magnecord_INC_Mar1952

Magnecord_INC_May1952

Magnecord_Inc_Nov1952

Magnecord_INC_sept1952