Need advice re: Purchase of Reel to Reel


I lack any knowledge about reel to reel players. I would like to get my dad one for Christmas as he was a DJ long ago and has many recordings of his shows. I looked on E-Bay but did not have any clue as to what to get, how much to spend, etc. Any advise or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
cahendeead0f

Showing 1 response by marakanetz

REEL TO REEL BASICS

1. Consumer reel to reel tapes are 1/4" and recorded at 7ips hence the most available empty or used pre-recorded bobins are 1/4" with 7" diameter you can find and so you should look for 1/4" tape capable RR player/recorder. If such tape has a recording on both sides and in stereo i.e. 2ch it means that all 4 tracks are used and you should also look for the player/recorder with 4-track playback and optionally recording.

2. Professional RR equipment has a large flexibility to use tapes of different width upto 1", 1/2" and so is a number of tracks depending on the needs of the recording engineer. Professional RR machines can record and playback on 15ips speed. Wider tape, larger speed gives a possibility of wider tracks that certainly have less noise and larger freequency bandwidth than conventional consumer RR tapes. You can assume that 1" full track recorder will have the best recording quality but will also use much more tape space. Also often 1" or larger tapes are used in analogue mixers that could mix upto 8 channels that by assumption may be fed by eight full-track machines connected onto one analogue mixer. Full track recording machines are being used professionally to record one channel at a time and than further to be mixed by analogue or digital proccessors.

3. You should decide for your needs which RR machine you will need a)either consumer type with 1/4trk record/playback(two sides stereo 2ch) or professional 1/2trk (one side stereo or two sides mono record/playback). I don't think that you'll need full-track machine in that case.
Please note that if you will take 1/2trk machine you won't able to playback a 1/4trk recordings but you will gain in higher quality recordings.

Among consumer RR I'd choose among Akai the ones that capable to play 10" reels.
Among professional RR machines I'd choose Otari MX5050 that have 1/2 record/playback and optional 1/4trk head for playback only.