Tape Recorders Again

It has been quite a while since I looked back at the golden era of sound recording on tape, in two separate ways, a period in which I played a minor but not insignificant part for a number of years.

Today I thought it might be interesting to remind myself of those tape recorders I'd rather like to have owned, but never did. For example, my old Teac A-7030, though still performing very well, could have done with being updated, and the newer equivalent A-7300 was rather nice. This short demo is of the quarter-track version, but I'd have gone for the half-track model...



An excellent machine for amateur recordists who do a lot of editing, as I did, was the slightly garish and over-silvered but otherwise excellent Tandberg TD 20A. I could have lived with this...



Now, here is the excellent (and so smooth yet very solid) Otari MTR-10 that was one of my favourites and a "perhaps one day" item for my admittedly rather ambitious shopping list...



It also needed some spare floor space! As an alternative, the Stellavox TD-9, though large in area, would have gone onto a tabletop and was an excellent editing machine as well. There was a console version available if I had found the money and the room for it...



There was also the Philips PRO-36, the big daddy to my trusty PRO-12 (which is still here) and available in a portable form as well as in a console...



These three were all too expensive for me, of course, and in the end I settled for an ex-LBC Ferrograph Studio-8 as my master recorder in a console, sadly now defunct and consigned to a skip only last year.

So, where did this all start?

I was about eight years old, and my father had acquired a Motek K-10 lower-track headed tape recorder. This was unusual in running the tape right-to-left; but because the heads were on the lower half (track) of the tape, it was still able to play recordings made on other recorders, and its tapes could be played on them.

My younger brother and I would be invited to record onto this; and I well recall doing my first ever impression (as far as I know it was my first) of a Daz washing powder television commercial. My brother played the member of the public who had to choose the better pile of washing, and I was the presenter who then disclosed that the better pile was not washed in Brand X but in Daz.

I had a bit of a problem saying "See the difference for yourself", the third word coming out more like "diffiness", but overall it wasn't a bad effort. Here is a similar machine, but with the later upper-track heads and with teh tape therefore running left-to-right. This was still the Motek deck, but in a Robuk recorder (I gather the two companies were connected)...



Later, when my father left us, he would regularly visit his mother (my grandmother) who lived a mile or so away from us. My brother and I would 'cycle there every Sunday morning, and I'd record messages for my father on an unusual Philips tape recorder that was there. Occasionally he'd record a message back to me. Thus we maintained contact through the medium of tape.

The recorder was not like the usual Philips EL-35xx models of that era, which had the common "piano key" controls for tape motion. Indeed, I rather fancied one such model to buy myself, the EL-3549...



(Sorry, no video found!) The model at my grandmother's house, though, was the even earlier (circa 1955) model EL-3510, and it had a rotary control between the spools that controlled the mechanics...



I also had a friend at school who had use of the family BSR TD-2 decked tape recorder at his home, so after school we'd sometimes go back there and record silly stuff, usually Goon Show sketches (I was even known as Neddy, as in Seagoon, at school, and for years afterward). Thus the bug had many chances to bite, and it is perhaps hardly surprising that sound recording on tape became my big hobby, lasting several decades.

It was a wonderful world, a true fusion of acoustics, electronics and mechanics, enabling creativity and innovation that perhaps is not so often found in this area of activity nowadays. How often do we see carefully measured tape loops supported by a couple of jam jars as guides?

The greatest joy of it, though, was ensuring that a lot of material was placed on record in a way that, by one means or another, will be available to future generations. Even if I have to convert it all to a digital format and re-save it in that form and in that kind of place, it will be well worth the effort both then (in making the original recordings) and now (in updating them to a modern format).

It will be a significant part of the legacy I shall leave to the world.