I had some experience with the Stephens 2", 40 track. The specs were horrible because you can't cheat Mother Nature. The 2", 32 track introduced by Telefunken wasn't bad, although it was used with Telcom noise reduction. A version of 3" audio tape was introduced in the 1970"s for a hot minute, that allowed for more tracks, but I don't think it made it to the production line. John Windt had a mod for a 24tr. that worked well. Basically, it was an add-on daughter board that took the inner-channel crosstalk, flipped the polarity, & reintroduced it. The device didn't get all of the crosstalk & other problems but, it did noticeably improve things. The gain was adjustable so, it took longer to align the machine. My $0.02 CB Corey Bailey Audio Engineering www.baileyzone.net On 12/20/2020 3:31 PM, Jamie Howarth wrote: > The late Roger Nichols talked about a zillion track multitrack head for mono or stereo whereby the correlated audio could be made distinct from each track's noise and AM distortion and that probably could work, but it's not as easy as it looks because the tape isn't dimensionally that stable, dynamically - local momentary stretching occurs.