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Re: [ARSCLIST] Oddball formats (was Distance between staggered heads)
At 01:29 PM 2007-12-31, Scott Phillips wrote:
Richard,
What was the oddest track format or spacing for an audio tape
you have run into so far ? Just curious... I know that instrumentation
tapes are a different animal, but I wondered about audio tape formats. I
am familiar with many of them myself, but you have more exposure to the
old and odd than I do.
Hello, Scott,
Some of the oddball formats that I have successfully transferred include:
0.150-inch tape
============
--Revere cartridges that are stereo and use the two edge tracks,
leaving a centre track for a never implemented (AFAIK) centre channel
for 3-channel stereo.
--Stuzzi Memo-Cord which is a 2-track format, but rim drive, but
fortunately good rim drive
--4-track 15/16 logging tape that had dramatic speed problems due to
recorder malfunction--much worse than rim drive.
0.250-inch tape
=============
--3-channel from Ampex 400s from the early 1950s from Jack Mullin's
collection made by Bill Cara. The piece I did was the Coast Starlight
coming into the Glendale, CA, train station. It sounds as if the same
PA system was there when my office was across the street from about
1983-1995 or so.
--Narrow, centered mono channel on paper tape
--8-track cartridges (OY) but they sound better than expected when
done on my FrankenSony pair of APR-5003Vs. (two passes, four tracks
per pass, elevator head--could also be done by flipping tape over,
but then if it's Dolby...).
0.500-inch tape
============
--7-track IRIG with FM seismic survey data on the APR-16, demodulated
by the Racal Store 4DS. You go crazy calculating bandwidth issues to
make sure you get everything off the tape that the client is
expecting. This particular tape was a dub of a 1/4-inch audio tape
that was part of an experiment to use lower-cost recorders for
seismic surveys. The original was a 4-track Magnecord. The original
is long gone.
Formats that I'm working on or have available:
===================================
--0.250-inch 5-track. Apparently Dictaphone or some other logging
recorder manufacturer made a 5-track unit with four program tracks
and a centre timecode track. Joe Dundovic told me about this head in
his stock, so I just had to have it. He had two and the other went to
a Scandinavian country after the engineer contacted me to address his
transfer of some old tapes in this format in their archive. I haven't
been asked to do any of this work.
--0.250-inch MaxTrax heads from Pacific Recorders TOMCAT cart
machines. I have a couple of these heads and one is mounted in the
record position on the same head assembly as the evenly spaced
3-track head I used for the Mullin/Cara tape mentioned above. No one
has asked me to transfer this format.
--0.500-inch 16 track. I'm trying now to convince the APR-16 to play
that format, with help a year or so ago from John French. I need to
finish the wiring as I had my arm twisted to do some tapes that they
didn't want to send to the U.S.A.
There are more out there, but these are the ones that pop into my mind.
There are also some very peripheral magnetic formats that I don't
have any intention of working on:
--IBM Executary belts (Art Shifrin and Steve Smolian do these, IIRC)
--The arcuate-recorded voice logging system that used wide tape and a
head that swung back and forth as the tape moved slowly. Conceptually
like quad videotape, but instead of a headwheel, it has a pivoting head.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.