At 06:06 PM 3/24/2003 -0800, Rod Stephens wrote:
>In all this discussion of playing back various forms of magnetic
>recordings using older used decks, I wonder if very many people ran into
>my problem?
>
>At my company's location in Hollywood, they originally had an Ampex reel
>to reel recorder/reproducer (a 350, I think), but gave it away before I
>came to work as their archivist. By the way, an excellent web site
>showing many generations and manufacturers of such decks is:
>
>http://www.phantomprod.com/vintage.html
>
>I finally realized that the Scully was running
>slow compared to the original transcription which I knew was "on" by the
>strobe on the side of the turntable. Unless a person has perfect pitch
>(I don't, although I read music and have sung, professionally), you can
>be fooled by what sounds to be an accurate reproduction. The speed
>dropped the pitch about a half-step, and over a half-hour show added
>about twenty seconds.to the running time.
Rod,
I'm sure you know, but I'd like to point out that in constant torque (as
opposed to constant tension) machines, this speed variation was variable
throughout the tape pack.
Classic Ampex machines were mostly constant torque. There was a constant
tension option for certain versions of the AG-440.
Cheers,
Richard
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