The first commercial tape recorder was released in 1946 so it’s certainly possible or if its a slight exaggeration and it’s a 50s one then very likely.
Indeed. A decent 1/4" tape recorder from decades ago will still work fine or be easy to repair/clean, and will still be capable of making great sounding recordings.
& If anything this has become the “weird instrument”, you can do all sorts of radiophonic workshop-esque stuff with tape loops etc 
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Introduced in the 1930s, BASF in Germany - they had PVC-backed tape and AC-biasing by the end of the war. As cementimental notes, the commercial recorders came right after the war.
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I have one of these reel to reels. I have all my father’s ‘letters home’ including GI shows on it from Vietnam. I will pass all this onto my son. Do yes grandfather thing certainly. I also have an original frank Sinatra reel.
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I thought that “tape deck” typically refers to cassette-based systems, and not reel-to-reel systems… but from this ad it seems to be used for reel-to-reel systems as well (though I believe the term was actually first applied to cassette systems, and wasn’t used for early reel-to-reel recorders).
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The difference is that it is easier to “throw out” files on a server, so perhaps finding a treasure trove of unknown recordings IS less likely now. At least with boxes of old tapes somebody is more likely to glance at label on the box. Although early Doctor Who episodes and the original footage of the first steps on the moon are proof that people do get rid of old analog recordings as well.
Also, a tape is a tape. Data are laid in a linear orderly fashion, with readout that is quite difficult without having the heads but can be improvised if needed. (Thought: could heads salvaged from a hard drive be used to sense data on tapes? A linear array of them then could be used to simulate a multitrack head, with delays in the recording software to compensate for their stacked (not in line as they are still too wide) positions? Todo: try, and try magnetic microscopy - head actuator that sweeps the head back and forth perpendicular to the tape, or in an angle (video-like), and recording the field strength vs spot on the tape.)
(Thought… if a more modern head, magnetoresistive one, is used, could the setup be even static or quasistatic? Induction-based heads require field change to give signal, GMR ones may not?)
With disks, it is by far less easy. We have the layer of a filesystem that can have defects or just plain out be unknown. We have the electronics that can degrade, firmware and sector maps on the service tracks that can doom all the rest of the data, and unlike analog recordings the digital ones do not degrade gracefully.
Then we have the issue of solid-state memories. It is one thing to read the NAND flash chips byte by byte, but we then also have to somehow reconstruct the order of the blocks with the data, as the wear leveling algorithms are scattering them around with each write. Some data are available in the wild, often from Russians who handle this stuff. But it is way less trivial than handling tape.
Also, physically damaged tape is easier to recover; you can cut out the damaged part and just lose a small part of the recording. Less easy with damage to digital media.
And then there’s the issue of CD/DVD disks that tend to degrade. A ten years old one with photos that I found recently was… readable, with some effort and lots of retries and a few photos remained damaged, luckily unimportant ones. I am glad I did not find it yet later.
My 2009 Macbook Pro is still like new. I put an SSD in it and it boots up faster, and programs start up faster than when it was brand new. If I did lots of photoshop or movie processing I’d probably hate it though. But the form factor is perfect, and it’s mostly metal and glass. It COULD last a lifetime. Since the entire system is pretty much just one board (no more stacked boards and sub-systems like the old laptops) Apple COULD choose to put together a brand new motherboard that would fit in my case and have all of the same ports (actually the thunderbolt port would be improved) and allow me to buy an entirely new computer without having to recycle my current one. They are completely full of crap when they say they are being “green” by making it out of recyclable materials. Make it 75% reusable and THAT would be green. Same with phones. Unless something really earthshaking comes along in form factor design, they could be offering motherboard upgrades for all of their products. The phone market is particularly bad when it comes to planned obsolescence through software upgrades.
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Yep, my memory is poor, but I know they were advertising firewire enclosures before 2000. I had an external CD-ROM back before 2000. USB 1.0 was way too slow for HDD, but firewire was 400Mbps from the start. I think USB started at around 12Mbps. But long before that we had SCSI HDD on our Macs. All the Macs had some sort of SCSI port before they moved to Firewire.
But with space on digital media being so cheap I have the opposite problem. I have many old drives with copies of stuff I’ve never deleted. Then I migrate to a new computer and down want to move everything, but the hoarder in me is afraid to throw it out. I was going through old drives the other day and found my digital pictures from 1999-2004. I REALLY need to consolidate everything in one place…
My best friend died last year and left me one of those.
He also left me three boxes of reel to reel tapes including some rare concerts and demo tapes.
This is the same guy who had 40+ hours of Firesign Theatre radio shows (that Firesign did not have) and at least 20 hours of first year non-syndicated Doctor Demento shows. (Both have the originals now.)
I am still finding rare gems in his collection. All will be digitized for your protection.
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OMG…make sure the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian get copies!
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I own a reel to reel from 1949.
tape deck: “The surface of a tape recorder above which the tape moves, together with
its attachments such as the motor(s) and other mechanisms, the magnetic
heads, and the circuits immediately associated with them, the whole
being built as a single unit; any device for moving tape from one spool
to another past magnetic heads”
I always loved the look of those reel-to-reel machines. But really, what I kind of lusted after was a Nagra ( http://www.automotiveillustrations.com/illustrators/yukio_miyamoto_nagra.html )
They were pretty much the definitive recording device for movie production and they just plain looked fantastic. I STILL want one and I’m not even an audiophile.
Notice that most studies suggest that the average age of a tape before it looses its recording is 30 years. Now would be a good time to make some backups - I suggest to vinyl or another (new) tape.
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[quote=“Jim_Campbell, post:4, topic:40144”]
i had a college teacher in the 90s who had one he still (at that time) used occasionally - He said yeah that was the real benefit of these… really up until digital formats, this was the only format that could go on that long.
[/quote]What about long play hifi VHS? How’s eight hours grab ya?
The first-gen PlayStation is known as a tip-top budget audiophile CD player, and the last of them, the 7000 series, had a really cool visualiser instead of the lame DSP reverbs on all the previous ones. I had one plugged into a hifi VHS deck at one point BITD, and it struck me that because the hifi sound was recorded the whole way across the 1/2"(?) tape, even at long play the sound quality was gonna be pretty sweet compared to a cassette. The funky visualiser on the PS could be set to remember a bunch on inputs, to cycle through some cool effects and whatnot, so you could record an epic mixtape from CDs, with something groovy for the telly screen if you switched it on (of course there’s a stereo plugged into the VCR).
Holy crap; that’s a vector illustration. Pretty impressive…
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I feel like this isn’t so much laughing at previous generations, but laughing at Sony. Typical of them to convince themselves that audio technology is going to remain unchanged up until they decide to introduce a new technology.
Typical SONY. They wouldn’t be the synonym for a warning label if not for their delusions of being (and later even futile attempts to be) in control.
Wow, that is pretty amazing. There’s a Nagra 4.2L (I take it the non-stereo version of this) on ebay available as “buy it now” for about $750. Looks like it’s seen better years.
(The site it’s hosted on is trying my patience. If I wanted to pilfer your pictures I’ve got ways aplenty and none of them require I right click. As it just so happens, I’m trying to copy and paste the model text and it’s a sight easier to right click than otherwise (for reasons I’m not getting into). What is this? 1999 on a geocities site?)
I had one of these. This exact model, a TC-377. Bought it at a pawn shop in 1981, together with an external Dolby noise reduction unit Sony sold under the Superscope name. Seems to me there was also a Superscope sticker somewhere on the back to the reel-to-reel unit.
It was a good consumer-grade unit. Three speeds (1 7/8ips up to 7.5ips) and three discrete heads, and you could record half-track mono. If you needed 24 hours’ worth of background music in mono, and didn’t mind checking on it every six hours, this could handle it.
Not being able to use larger reels was a limitation, but I did use it for some live recording. Only weak point I ever found were the drive belts, which were like big O-rings rather than being flat belts, meaning they were a pain in the ass to find if they broke, which they didn’t do often. Sony was just as bad about parts in the 1980s as they are now.
