David Lennick wrote:
> we had a similar problem with tapes made on our ancient Utah tape
> recorder (full track, bought in 1950). When we began copying the tapes
> made on that machine over to the Wollensak in 1959, anything recorded
> prior to 1955 had to be copied from another Wollensak because repeated
> repairs to the Utah had resulted in its running fast (about 8 IPS) and
> the tapes were noisy and cruddy sounding after a certain point,
> probably because of head wear. We didn't have a quarter-track machine
> yet so we were too dumb to know that we'd get better results from the
> right channel or down the middle of the tape track.
>
> dl
Ooh! Ooh! (as in Toody in Car 54) Here's something I haven't mentioned
before. Any of you ever try to play a mono upper-quarter track tape on
a full-track Ampex 600??? When I was at the Temple Univ station I
sometimes recorded something on my quarter-track home machine for
playing at the station, knowing that I had to use clean tape and record
on only one track. Our station was still in mono. The tapes played on
our half-track mono machines of various makes, on our half-track stereo
Ampex 354-2, on the damn full-track Maggie PT-6's, but it was BLANK
when played on our full track Ampex 600, and possibly our 601. I
finally discovered why. The head face on the playback head was convex
curved to play the center of the tape and miss the edges. It was a true
portable machine and they figured that it would sometimes play damaged
tapes and this would avoid playing ragged or creased edges. It took a
bit of experimentation, but I found a place on the Head-Track Selector
that would lower the head just enough to record a tape that could be
played back on a half-track mono machine and that 600.

Mike (there's a hold-up in the Bronx) Biel [log in to unmask]