If playing a vinyl record isn't enough hassle

[Beedster]

[BigRedX]

2 hours ago, Huge Hands said:

Are they 1/4" tape?  If they're like the ones in the OP's photo. then surely you would need to buy studio quality machines like Studer etc with those big locking hubs?

 

My dad was into reel-to-reels in the 80s and had some pretty professional looking domestic models. but they all had the small 3 prong hole in the middle like @Rosie C's example. 

 

Not that those full size reels would fit on Rosie's machine! 

 

I wonder if they do adaptors for the centre?

 

Not that I am planning to go down this rabbit hole of course!  It's a long time since I tried splicing tape on a Revox B77!

 

EDIT - I just clicked the link and saw how much they were - definitely not!

 

Not only are they the large size reels but they also run at 15ips, which means a proper professional tape machine and not a consumer model Revox. Adaptors should have been supplied with the tape machine not the tapes.

 

I briefly owned a professional model Studer tape machine that had come from a BBC local radio station where it had been used for tape editing. This meant that as well as the small built-in splicing block, a more serious version had also been bolted to the front. The whole top panel was criss-crossed with razor-blade scratches, including the padded arm rest at the front. And there was no input recording circuitry so the machine could only be used for playback. Apparently this was deliberate on the part of Studer so they could sell these machines as playback/editing only where there was no chance of user error pressing record and wiping the tape.

 

Mine was bought for digitising a number of reel-to-reel tapes of recordings made by the first band I was in during the late 70s/early 80s. The magnetic parts of the tapes were luckily still intact. However some of the splices hadn't fared as well and I was presented with a mixture of tapes where most the splices had failed and others where the glue had oozed out of the joints and spread to the rest of the tape causing the spooled tape to stick together. In the end I had to run each splice separately through the machine (after cleaning off any excess glue), and where the splices had been used to do mid-track edits join them back up in my DAW.

[Beedster]

28 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

Not only are they the large size reels but they also run at 15ips, which means a proper professional tape machine and not a consumer model Revox. Adaptors should have been supplied with the tape machine not the tapes.

 

I briefly owned a professional model Studer tape machine that had come from a BBC local radio station where it had been used for tape editing. This meant that as well as the small built-in splicing block, a more serious version had also been bolted to the front. The whole top panel was criss-crossed with razor-blade scratches, including the padded arm rest at the front. And there was no input recording circuitry so the machine could only be used for playback. Apparently this was deliberate on the part of Studer so they could sell these machines as playback/editing only where there was no chance of user error pressing record and wiping the tape.

 

Mine was bought for digitising a number of reel-to-reel tapes of recordings made by the first band I was in during the late 70s/early 80s. The magnetic parts of the tapes were luckily still intact. However some of the splices hadn't fared as well and I was presented with a mixture of tapes where most the splices had failed and others where the glue had oozed out of the joints and spread to the rest of the tape causing the spooled tape to stick together. In the end I had to run each splice separately through the machine (after cleaning off any excess glue), and where the splices had been used to do mid-track edits join them back up in my DAW.

 

....which, I guess, is one reason DAWs were invented  

[Huge Hands]

2 hours ago, BigRedX said:

I briefly owned a professional model Studer tape machine that had come from a BBC local radio station where it had been used for tape editing. This meant that as well as the small built-in splicing block, a more serious version had also been bolted to the front. The whole top panel was criss-crossed with razor-blade scratches, including the padded arm rest at the front. And there was no input recording circuitry so the machine could only be used for playback. Apparently this was deliberate on the part of Studer so they could sell these machines as playback/editing only where there was no chance of user error pressing record and wiping the tape.

 

At university in the 90s doing Electronics and Music Tech we had an ex-BBC engineer as a lecturer who decided to try and teach us how to correctly set up the head bias (he had set out of kilter) on a Studer with an oscilloscope.   I remember saying to him "This is all well and good, but what if something went really wrong with it?  Wouldn't it be good to look at that?"  He replied that he didn't want to break his precious Studer any more than that as they were too expensive...   

 

He was a lovely guy so I'm not knocking him personally but I always got frustrated that we never got any real-world electronic failures to deal with on our course, just lots of theory.