Portable recorders

The odd time or two I mentioned something that was very much a part of my teenage years cos it pretty well went everywhere with me but only in passing.

The ITT Studio 720 went back and forth to boarding school with me because it was portable stereo cassette recorder that would plug into a stereo to play or record from records or the radio with a simple five pin "Din" connector but would run off batteries as well as mains.

Featuring both an internal speaker and a crazy German five pin 240 degree headphone socket that needed an adapter it was as much at home in the dorm playing back albums or recording live music with a pair of microphones as wired to my hifi at home.

I had this until the mid nineteen eighties but that all in one portable idea remained lodged in my head simply because it's so practical.

Moving on, there were special "field" recorders built for professional uses like news gathering, on the spot music recording etc made to replace the transportable Uher and Nagra reel to reel models used by the likes of the BBC that used cassettes instead.

They were like my ITT but pretty much on steroids, built to survive anything made by people such as Marantz and Sony.

The Sony TC-D5 was originally introduced in late 1978/9 with a special drive system to ensure that even when swung around there was no wobble on the sound and like all professional recorders has a minus 20db limiter in the microphone circuit you can switch in so the input from a loud rock group captured from the microphone doesn't distort before you set the record level.

That is a difference between my ITT that had both a automatic and manual record level but no such limiter and its mechanics were less advanced.

The model shown is the TC D5M which was a revised version from 1980 which allowed for the use of Metal oxide tape which was introduced in that period and as a result had Sendust and Ferrite heads fitted rather than the ferrite ones of the previous model to get get the best out of such tape.

Again my ITT could only handle type I "normal" tapes and using a auto sensor type II "chrome".

Being a Sony it also could handle type III ferrochrome tapes but they tended to be less popular and with tape advances in types I and II when it came to performance, increasingly outdated.

That is one reason why I bought a TC D5M because it does everything that ITT did but better up to and including having Dolby B noise Reduction which to be honest I tend not to be a fan of but is useful for any tapes recorded with it.

The small Sony WMD6 Pro series of pocket sized field recorders of the late 1980's offered the then new Dolby C but apart from having a few peak indicators, dolby C is incompatible with machines without and even more susceptible to audible decoding errors than B when played on one that does feature it.

Mine was bought with a leather carry case that allows full hand control of function with a section that gives access to the cassette tray to change the tape and a European mains adapter for 230 volt .

It has a five centimetre speaker for mentoring and adjustable headphone output apart from standard gold plated RCA line in and out sockets

There is just no comparison between the small and somewhat crude scale on the ITT's and these precise, back light ones that also double up as battery indicator although both machines used Volume Unit or Vu (known to some of us as "virtually useless" because they underread transients) metering rather than peak levels although the Sony has a single peak that flashes at +7db.

Those of us brought up in that era learned to read them, never straying over 0db which is helped on the Sony by a optional limiter that does carefully prevent any sudden peaks from overloading the tape progressively unlike one I knew on a National Panasonic home deck that just just cut the level right back to a very low setting which was both crass apart from being ill conceived.

The transport is wholly mechanical which was common place in the late nineteen seventies before solenoids, touch buttons and remotes came in apart from being top loading which was to lose favour for home decks as people stacked their hifi systems with the turntable on the top.

In terms of performance it approaches on the record/replay cycle a very high standard of reproduction equalling many expensive home decks even if this only has two unlike say most Nakimichi's that had  separate record and replay heads for off the tape monitoring.

As someone who just loves tape technology I hope you can see just why I love these machines.