Thanks Richard for mentioning the later designs. I realized my omission
when, after hitting the send button, I turned around and there was my
Otari MTR-15 sitting there.

Cheers!

Corey

On 2/8/2016 10:06 AM, Richard L. Hess wrote:
> Hi, Corey,
>
> Ah yes, the Firesign Theatre tape that appeared to have been made with
> part two overwriting part one (but going in the other direction, I
> think). It was two track stereo. I suspected that this was the reason
> and I realize it was used to reduce erase noise. If the erase head had
> not been disabled, they would have lost one half hour segment instead
> of two--although there was a tantalizing hint to what be there, we
> could not find even a sliver to recover without the other program.
>
> Later designs with higher erase frequencies and especially lower
> waveform distortion did not need to do this. There was no longer a
> benefit.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
>
>
> On 2/8/2016 12:39 AM, Corey Bailey wrote:
>> Other "out of the box" thinking at the time led to disabling the erase
>> head for first-pass on virgin tape to help the signal-to-noise ratio.
>> This was accomplished by switching the erase voltage to a dummy head so
>> that the load remained the same on the erase amp. Even tried this with
>> 2" multitrack recording with improved S/N results but then, the mixer
>> du-jour would forget to turn on the erase head when needed and record
>> sound-on-sound for a punch-in so, the multitrack innovation was
>> abandoned.