The tale of the tape has run

 Well it didn't come home losing by two goals to one and the manager resigned but we're back this week with a different entry.

The tale of the tape as  told over the odd entry had a move in  December of 1985 with the arrival of a auto reverse seperates deck with Dolby B and the then new C noise reduction but that turned out to be a disappointment as it its recordings were less than open.

By November of 1991  thoughts were moving towards a major change withing the hifi aided by a large pot of money so I bought what I thought was the best value cassette deck a Technics three headed machine so you could hear what was coming off the tape and some fancy tape tuning stuff to get the best from whatever tape you used to record on.

That didn't sound too great with the internal circuits masking much detail so for a long period we moved to MiniDisc, the domestic digital format until the last home deck died (and the format being dead).

We'd bought a decent Yamaha deck from the early 90's which although it only had two heads actually sounded better than the Technics ever did but I was still longing for that monitoring in real time advantage.

Well I saw recently a suitable machine that had the advantage of being fully serviced, calibrated serviced, and aligned which given this machine was made in 1994 really needs to give of its very best as like us, they are getting old.

The AD-F 850 was made in Singapore at a point where a newer form of Dolby noise reduction, type S was on the horizon aimed at seeing off the challenge of digital recording by improving on what cassette could offer but just missed this mode.

Although it is a little plastic feeling compared to top decks by people such as Nakamichi, it was cheaper and does make extremely good recordings aide by adjustable bias and record sensitivity although it lacks a calibration oscillator.

The biggest gain though is it has a dual capstan transport to provide the smoothest most accurate passage of the tape across the heads for the highest quality which is something that Technics model never had.

Compared to that, it is a revelation, sounding very open, stable to the point you wouldn't know you were listening to a reproduction.

The wheel has turned finally getting the machine I wanted.

The 2023 tape sort

One thing I usually do every so often is to look through my recording media and consider if I need any new ones or if those I may have which bearing in mind only a small amount of new cassettes are made and as far as I'm aware no new blank MiniDiscs are being made at all some may be in less than great shape if heavily used.

I had a small amount of very basic "normal" Maxell tapes that are fine for things like voice recording but not really best suited to good quality music being a little restricted in high frequencies  and not able to take highish levels to help keep hiss at bay.

 I picked up a number of still sealed by sadly no longer made very high quality type II cassettes that perform exceptionally well in that oddball tape length, the C46.

C46 was really for the "average" lp length album where you didn't wish to wind on to find the side of a C90 you put an album and usually had thicker tape, less likely to wearout and were less popular whereas the C90 was the length of choice for those who made their own compilation mixtapes and usually are harder to get new.

They had a nominal 23 minutes per side but often went to more like 24 which is useful.

They work well for my purposes and I picked up while I was at it a couple of the 90 minute versions  and a pre-owned but lightly played metal oxide tape which are "The Best" but being out of production for over 25 years tend to be extremely expensive as new sealed items often bough more by collectors of tapes than those of us who use them for what their intended purpose was, making recordings.

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.

The earliest recordings

This friday I thought I'd rewind back to when I'd of been six and three quarters and when it was that for Christmas I was bought my very own pocket tape recorder.

You may well scoff at the thought of "pocket" being deployed to describe it but in the era we are talking about most people had recorders that took various sized reels of tape that reflected how portability mattered to you, Dad had a larger home machine that took five and three quarter inch spools but also a Sharp RT303 portable recorder that used batteries and three and a third sized spools that by that point I could 'borrow' when remembering not to place fingers on the tape when fast winding as it would act like a band saw!  

That picture is tiny and I haven't found another of the model I had which was like that except the case was turquoise blue  but the Prinzsound TR6 was the one I had with a pull up lid you placed and pushed the cassettes down into.

That place and push in action was easier for me and I suspect probably why I was bought a cassette machine

This is a later one but it's easier to explain with it on the far right you had the playback volume control for the speaker or earphone keys for fast wind and fast reverse on mine pressing both acted as a stop button but on this later one it had a separate button and on the far left with a coloured marker was the record button with you pressed followed by play to record things.

With it came some tapes and they were these which to be honest were cheap although a little later on I had some EMI "Sound Hog" ones with a hippo design on the label.

I recorded things like songs from Top of the Pops although dad had made a lead up so I could record direct from the radio, and things like parties being a  kind of sound record which given I wasn't good at writing helped keeping memories.

In 1975 I used it to record the Christmas Bay City Rollers BBC Radio One special with interviews and music.

This is a good a spot to drop in that Ian Mitchell who was during 1976 a member of the Bay City Rollers around the period of the Dedication album replacing Alan Longmuir during that period died aged 62 and who outside of the BCR was a important part of the group Rosetta Stone.

He was the first Roller to come from outside of Scotland, in his instance Northern Ireland.

Although as I got older I had recorder that used big reels cos they just sounded a lot better then, I kept it until I acquired a ITT Studio 73 portable stereo cassette deck for use in boarding school as the schools music centre was not something that you really wanted to listen to being a cheap Fidelity model.

By that point both cassette decks and especially the blank tapes were improving so they sounded closer to home reel based recorders that took the larger five and three quarter or seven inch reels

I have a Technics stereo cassette deck in my stereo system that still sees considerable usage and a large stash of high quality blank tapes for it.