What ever happened to Reel to Reel? I thought was suppose to be the cleanest sound?

Re what happened to R2R, I still have a R2R Sony machine and a few R2R tapes from back in the day. Great for making long playing mix tapes and doing various recording tricks with them. Alas, R2Rs are a vanishing breed and repairs, if needed, are basically unobtainable as there are few, if any, local radio-t/v-stereo repair shops anymore. The other factor is that R2R tape is now expensive and has to be sourced, at least in my experience. The sound quality produced by good (I'm talking about you TDK and BASF) recording tape was excellent, again, depending on one's recording skills, if you weren't using commercially made tapes of popular music.

Quote
Chris Fountain
What ever happened to Reel to Reel? I thought was suppose to be the cleanest sound?

DATs were fantastic. Still are, I'm sure, but impractical other than for studio work and even that may be pointless.

> if you weren't using commercially made tapes of popular music.

Thing is, that varied widely. Most commercial rtr tapes were recorded at 3 3/4 ips and sounded decent. This is 2X what a cassette is recorded at. But occasionally, rtr version release would be at 7 1/2 ips, which made for much better sound. Frank Zappa released a couple, the Uncle Meat tape I had was 7 1/2, and Columbia was releasing in that format speed pretty regularly, In A Silent Way I recall was that speed, and I believe one or more Weather Report releases too, I Sing the Body Electric being one I had.

They were just over complicated for the average schmoe to deal with. Always a semi-pro thing anyhow, but indeed the best sound available especially if you could get true 1st gen master copies on high speed recording.

jb

We have the technology.

Quote
dmay
Re what happened to R2R, I still have a R2R Sony machine and a few R2R tapes from back in the day. Great for making long playing mix tapes and doing various recording tricks with them. Alas, R2Rs are a vanishing breed and repairs, if needed, are basically unobtainable as there are few, if any, local radio-t/v-stereo repair shops anymore. The other factor is that R2R tape is now expensive and has to be sourced, at least in my experience. The sound quality produced by good (I'm talking about you TDK and BASF) recording tape was excellent, again, depending on one's recording skills, if you weren't using commercially made tapes of popular music.

Yes, I used to run a Phillips R2R machine and the sound quality was nice and "warm". Sadly the machine and tapes were lost in a fire twenty years ago, but it was already very difficult even then to find spares or repairs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2020-12-17 10:35 by Green Lady.

Awwww yeah still remember the first CD player i had
and only disc i owned was Stones -- Beggars Banquet .....

Repeat function on player was way cool so every night
Beggars was hammering away all night long....but for
some reason like everytime Id wake the intro inta Sympathy was playing .....

Lived like that for two-three weeks till turned
inta walking Sympathy Devil zombie ..... Please allow me .....



ROCKMAN

not playing my cd(r)'s that much.. but i do listen to my old (and some new) tapes. (most TDK-SA-90 )

Life's just a cocktail party on the street