Reel to Reel is the New Vinyl

[MakeMineVinyl]

Oh my, this is strange. Not sure what to think, but by the looks of some of the pimped out reel to reels near the bottom of the page, some people are totally missing the point. :scared-eek:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/5/94095 ... udio-trend

 

[TitaniumTroy]

Thanks for the post, Altec, opps SoundHound, oh I meant... well you get the point. Whenever I move to a bigger place and build my ultimate dream system, I think i'll put one of those AKAI GX-747's in my system just to look cool.

I haven't really thought seriously about R2R since the mid eighties, when some of my Air Force barrack room mates were recording to tape from vinyl.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

Oh my, this is strange. Not sure what to think, but by the looks of some of the pimped out reel to reels near the bottom of the page, some people are totally missing the point. :scared-eek:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/5/94095 ... udio-trend

If you do decide to take the plunge, be extremely careful about what you buy, and don't hesitate to ask me any questions etc. Analog tape machines take some pretty specialized knowledge to wrangle into shape, especially if they haven't been taken care of, and many parts are likely to be unusable (and unavailable); some things like pinch rollers have to be hand made by the couple of people who make these in their spare time (seriously). The people who actually know how to work on them are getting in shorter supply, and the ones that do know what they're doing typically charge an arm and a leg. Buy from eBay with *****EXTREME**** caution!

 

[Barney]

I didn't realize the costs of tapes was that high, $450 +/- ! Is that for one album or whats the typical length of a tape ? Not that I could afford the gear but just curious.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

I didn't realize the costs of tapes was that high, $450 +/- ! Is that for one album or whats the typical length of a tape ? Not that I could afford the gear but just curious.

A 10" reel of 1/4" tape (2500 feet) is about $60. I don't know where that guy got his information. There are several things he wrote which are not completely accurate. I think the $450 was for a pre recorded album: way too much money in my opinion.

 

[Wardsweb]

IMHO there is nothing better than a mixed down master tape (or direct copy) on a good machine. It's like vinyl with a CD black background. Now this is for 1/4" 1/2 15ips recordings and not the mass produced slower speed 4 track tapes of the 50's, 60's and 70's. I don't think reel to reel will ever return to its glory days. For me it is like the Japanese Tea Ceremony; part art and part ritual. As for tapes costing a lot, that isn't for blank tape or older the massed produced stuff. Master tapes and direct copies from companies putting out high end stuff for the audiophile market can range $300+ a tape.

thetapeproject.com
ultraanaloguerecordings.com
opus3records.com
mastertapesoundlab.com

Here is a picture of my machines. The Tascam BR20 in my go to for serious listening. The Revox C270 my other 2 track machine. Although the Teac X-2000M will do both 2 and 4 track. It's more a consumer market machine like the others.

 

[Deleted member 133]

I think it would be way cool to own a R2R deck. Then I could dub all of my CDs onto tape and enjoy the amazing sound that I've been missing all my life. It certainly would beat dubbing all my vinyl onto cassette!

Jeff

 

[Flint]

I sold off my old studio R2Rs about 12 years ago after transferring all the tapes (most of which requiring baking to play them) to digital format. It is funny, the only tapes which consistently worked flawlessly after all the years were Maxell brand.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

I sold off my old studio R2Rs about 12 years ago after transferring all the tapes (most of which requiring baking to play them) to digital format. It is funny, the only tapes which consistently worked flawlessly after all the years were Maxell brand.

This problem, called "sticky-shed syndrome" effected almost all tapes made from the 1970s to the 1980s. It was the result of most manufacturers changing the binding agent they used to hold the back coating on the tape from whale oil (endangered species etc....) to a urethane based formula. Unfortunately what nobody considered (or thought of) was that the urethane would break down naturally over the period of a decade or two and turn to a sticky goo. As a result, most tapes are unplayable due to extremely high friction caused by the tape, and the fact that the back coating gets deposited on the tape guidance system, causing yet more friction. The solution is to bake these tapes at 120 degrees for at least 8 hours, which yields a tape which is playable several times before reverting back to its goo-ey state.

I have tapes made before this period from the 1950s which are perfectly playable (CDs should be so reliable), and of course the tape manufacturers (both of them) changed the formula to something more stable since then, so this should not be a problem in the future.

Maxell probably stuck with whale oil, which avoided the problem in the first place.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

I think it would be way cool to own a R2R deck. Then I could dub all of my CDs onto tape and enjoy the amazing sound that I've been missing all my life. It certainly would beat dubbing all my vinyl onto cassette!

Jeff

I assume you are being serious here, so I'll give a serious answer based on my experiences....

Copying a digital file onto tape does not yield the kind of "pixie dust" subjective improvement in listenability as it does copying a digital file to vinyl, especially if the vinyl is cut at 45 RPM. Pretty much what goes into tape comes out. An aggressive and hard sounding file will still sound aggressive and hard after being copied to tape (with added hiss from the tape recording process). The distortions added by the tape cycle are almost exclusively odd order (3rd, 5th, 9th,11th etc), with very little of the even order harmonics which are the ones which give a subjectively "smoother" sound quality.

The cycle of being cut to lacquer and subsequent pressing of vinyl adds a witches brew of colorations and even and odd harmonics, including some phase non-linearity. In addition the background "noise" of vinyl contains a high amount of shifting phase. All of these "distortions" tend to be euphonic, pleasing to the ear (or at least "some ears").

Yeah, yeah, I know there are those who insist on hearing precisely, exactly, absolutely what is on the "original master" (whatever that is, but that's a subject for another time), and that is fine. If that's what you like, move along, nothing to see here.....

The article I linked to goes way overboard in touting the magical-mystical qualities of tape in my opinion. I have a feeling this newly-found retro "trend" might be more about style than sound quality to its intended audience, and that's fine too, I guess. It seems many younger people today think of "good sound" as being a bluetooth computer speaker.

Whatever. :music-listening:

 

[Yesfan70]

....."$450 seems almost reasonable to hear Lee Morgan’s trumpet riffs on The Sidewinder just as recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder heard them over half a century ago in his New Jersey studio. Incidentally, a Lee Morgan trumpet riff on tape doesn’t just sound better than a Lee Morgan trumpet riff on vinyl. It sounds better than a Lee Morgan trumpet riff on any audio format: CD, SACD, Pure Audio Blu-Ray, even Neil Young’s crazy 24-bit/192 kHZ hi-res files that take forever to download."......

:laughing-rolling:


$450 is reasonable? Seriously? I seriously doubt it's going to sound $440 better than my $10 CD.

 

[Botch]

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

....."$450 seems almost reasonable to hear Lee Morgan’s trumpet riffs on The Sidewinder just as recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder heard them over half a century ago in his New Jersey studio. Incidentally, a Lee Morgan trumpet riff on tape doesn’t just sound better than a Lee Morgan trumpet riff on vinyl. It sounds better than a Lee Morgan trumpet riff on any audio format: CD, SACD, Pure Audio Blu-Ray, even Neil Young’s crazy 24-bit/192 kHZ hi-res files that take forever to download."......

:laughing-rolling:


$450 is reasonable? Seriously? I seriously doubt it's going to sound $440 better than my $10 CD.

One thing that stood out in the article is the part about the tapes being duplicated at a "leisurely 30 ips, directly from the original master tape". Duplication at 30ips indicates that the tapes are NOT being duplicated at the actual playing speed; they are being duplicated either at 2x (for 15ips) or 4x (for 7.5ips) the playing speed of the final tape. There are massive problems with this. With analog tape, you cannot just speed up the reproducing machine and the recording machine and expect that there will not be losses and distortions resulting from this. All the frequencies on the tape will be doubled; 20kHz now becomes 40kHz, which is in the ragged edge of what analog can accomplish; 30ips generally only is capable of 30kHz with low noise and distortion. To record this at all requires very specialized duplicating equipment, and this was basically the Ampex 3200 and 3300 series duplicators. If one of these actually exist today, I would be utterly amazed. They were not machines which anybody in their right mind would consider worthy of keeping once reel to reel tape fell out of favor in the 1970s (due to cassettes).

Thus whatever these people are duplicating the tapes on must be franken-machines. Actual duplicators are a tremendous bitch to design, build and maintain and it is highly doubtful that the small companies making these tapes have the requisite skill and funds to actually build a real duplicator. Even if they did, high speed duplicators created tapes which were compromised by noise, limited frequency response and distortion; just take a listen to any of the mass produced tapes from the "golden era" of pre-recorded open reel tapes - they were pretty much shit!

So what you are getting from your $450 is a tape copy which is already compromised from the start. No mention was made of the tape speed and track configuration which these tapes have. If they are the typical 1/4 track layout of all consumer machines, the signal to noise ratio is going to be far worse than even horrible digital mp3. The tapes will be very hissy. This will be compounded if the tape is meant to be played back at 7 1/2 ips, which further compromises signal to noise ratio and distortion (due to saturation at the slow speed; if you lower the recording level to avoid saturation, you get more noise). The only format which has a chance of sounding reasonable is 15ips half track as used on professional tape machines. A few consumer machines came with this option.

But if the duplicated tape has been made at 2x normal speed, it is compromised to begin with, so why pay $450 (or even $45) for it?

Its just a can of worms all around.

 

[Deleted member 133]

It's getting so that a fellow can't do satire without using an emoticon!

Jeff

ps. Other than live studio / home recording I'm having reel trouble figuring out a roll for R2R.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

It's getting so that a fellow can't do satire without using an emoticon!

Jeff

ps. Other than live studio / home recording I'm having reel trouble figuring out a roll for R2R.

Then perhaps someone else might find my answer useful

 

[Zing]

Other than live studio / home recording I'm having reel trouble figuring out a roll for R2R.

I see what you did there (even without an emoticon).

 

[Lone Stranger]

Timely thread. About a week ago I bought a Reel RSW 1215 subwoofer for $65 Canadian. I hooked it up to the amplifier used for the electronic organ in my church. It actually fills the auditorium with deep bass quite well. I noticed it has a "Reel to Reel" connection for connecting another Reel subwoofer to the first sub.

Talk about changing the subject while still keeping it reel.

 

[Botch]

:naughty:

 

[Deleted member 133]

Other than live studio / home recording I'm having reel trouble figuring out a roll for R2R.

I see what you did there (even without an emoticon).

Good eye!

But did anyone catch the second play on words: "Roll" (a la pinch rollers) versus "role"?

Jeff

 

[Deleted member 133]

Timely thread. About a week ago I bought a Reel RSW 1215 subwoofer for $65 Canadian. I hooked it up to the amplifier used for the electronic organ in my church. It actually fills the auditorium with deep bass quite well. I noticed it has a "Reel to Reel" connection for connecting another Reel subwoofer to the first sub.

Talk about changing the subject while still keeping it reel.

I bow to your superior word play!

It wowed me. And my heart's a flutter.

Jeff