I’ve always been interested in obsolete recording media, from cylinders to cassettes. One you almost never hear about is reel-to-reel tape. The only time I’ve seen them is in the most out-of-the-way part of used record stores. So can anybody who remembers them tell me:
How exactly did they run?
How common were they and in what time period?
Where did you get prerecorded tapes, and how popular were they?
Considering the high quality of sound they gave, why weren’t they more popular?
This answers pretty much all your questions.
I don’t understand the question. Isn’t it obvious how they run?
Pre-recorded open reels were never common.
I saw pre-recorded open reels in a very small section of a very large record store, and saw them advertised by record clubs (which is where I bought most of mine). You generally had to go well out of your way to get them. So far as I can tell, there was never much of a market for pre-recorded open reel tapes. Blank tapes were easily available. I bought them at Radio Shack, Sears, record stores, pretty much any place that carried either records or electronic equipment.
Expense and inconvenience. Reel-to-reel was generally considered high-end equipment for audiophiles who were willing to spend top dollar. Mounting an open reel tape was pretty bothersome, compared to a cassette, 8-track or LP, which tended to make them even less popular among general consumers who weren’t audiophiles. They gave excellent sound, and you could get hours of music on a single tape, but they were generally expensive and troublesome.
They were and still are popular with collectors of old time radio shows.
I’ve known people who used to record music on VHS tape, because you could get as much as six hours of high quality sound on a single tape.
Although nowhere near as common as vinyl, tons of albums were released on reel to reel. I personally own about 50 or so from the 60s and the sound quality is way better than most vinyl from the same era.
I was visiting a friend this weekend who owns at least 6 or 7 reel to reel machines and hundreds of tapes.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it an obsolete medium, either. Many recording studios still use them and some people actually prefer the sound of analog tape than digital media.
In 1969, when I went to college, reel-to-reel tapes were second after records as a way of listening to music. I actually bought one before I bought a record player, and used it to record all my friends records. Cassettes existed at the time, but they were of very poor quality, and I don’t remember ever seeing a cassette deck of the type familiar today.
Yes tapes were easily available, in pretty much any record store. WBCN in Boston used to run a rare tape night, where they played bootlegs and unreleased tracks they had, and at least one record store had a special tape sale in support of it.
They lost in popularity after cassette quality became reasonable, since tapes took up a lot of space. Reel to reel decks were not particularly expensive - even to me as a student - and save more than their cost in not buying records. I knew lots and lots of people with them, beside me. Big tapes could fit five albums on them, and cost about $4, so this was very cost effective.
I moved all my tapes onto cassettes around 1979, and dumped my deck soon after.
Reel-to-reel were popular in the 60s, for sure. A fellow Seabee had one in 1968 made by Akai. It had a built in 8-track so you could record from one to the other. The big manufacturers were Akai, Sony, and Teac. I had a Sony that had auto reverse that functioned without having to apply that damn sensing tape. It was pretty advanced for the time, and I seem to recall paying about $400 for it. You could also buy the studio-type units that played the big 10" reels at an incredibly low RPM, which meant you could cram a ton of music onto one reel. I had a fair-sized collection of store-bought 7-1/2" reels, and a shitload of ones I recorded myself off of vinyl. Alas, all landfill now. Size, weight, and the cumbersome process of loading tapes helped its demise.
They run just like a cassette player: two motors and a set of heads for playback and record, and some rubber wheels for fast-forward and tensioning. You had to have a take-up reel to accept the tape, and (for most models) had to manually thread the tape through the wheels, across the heads, and onto the take-up. The tapes were prone to stretching and breaking (as were cassettes). Most decent reel players had two speeds for record and playback, depending on the quality you were looking for. High speed = better quality.
My roommate back in the early 70s had reel-to-reel. He didn’t buy prerecorded tapes; he just recorded LPs he bought. In addition, he had a few concert tapes – sort of bootlegs; he worked at a concert venue and they taped the acts (many years later, I saw one of the tapes he had an official release).
Reel-to-reel had better fidelity than cassettes at the time, mostly because the tapes ran faster.
The advantage is that he could put on a tape and have it run all day without changing records (or flipping them over).
ips (inches per second)
7-1/2 ips was the common tape speed for high fidelity, though professionals used 15. Cassettes used 1-7/8 ips, though the heads and electronics were fully optimized for that speed allowing for better fidelity at that speed than you might expect.
And because they were wider!
I used reel-to-reel tapes in commercial and college radio up through the mid-1990s. I don’t know if they’re still common, but then, it was the standard tool for recording and editing audio for broadcast. After a bit was complete, it would be transferred to a looped-tape cartridge for use on the air. Carts (very similar to the “eight-track tape” for home use) would automatically cue up to the beginning after playing, so they were very useful for audio that was going to be used repeatedly. Most music was transferred to carts for broadcast.
Radio news anchors, if they were in a hurry and they were very good at cueing tape, might not bother to transfer a snippet to cartridge first.
In the field, we used Marantz cassette tape recorders. So the sequence very often was cassette --> reel-to-reel --> cart.
My dad was quite the audiophile back in the mid '60s and he had a TEAC reel to reel that still works to this day–my mom inherited it in the divorce. He bought vinyl albums and recorded them onto 7-inch tapes, then gave the albums to me. This is why I have all Deutsche Gramophon and Capitol label Beatles albums along with a whole butt load of other vintage vinyl. I could never have afforded all those records on my allowance! The greatest advantage of the tapes was that you could put huge amounts of music on one tape, which was great for cocktail parties and suchlike–no need to keep changing records. The sound quality was great and the tape survived constant replays–many of the tapes he made originally are still playable and still sound great. The downcheck was having to rewind fifty miles of tape when you were done.
Sure wish I still had his old Fisher tube receiver because that thing could tune in signal from the moon!
Why rewind? Didn’t he record on both sides?
Modern receivers are less sensitive for a reason. There’s a tradeoff between sensitivity and selectivity and that kind of sensitivity wouldn’t work nowadays in an urban area.
I was in a garage band in high school. We recorded our “albums” on a Realistic 999 stereo reel-to-reel with sound-on-sound capability.
How exactly did they run?
Basic units used a single motor for all functions,at the high end each reel had a motor in addition to the capstan (tape)drive.Better units sensed the drop in tension when the reel played off and stopped the drive.It was easy to mangle tape with the cheapos. Better units had separate tape heads for each function.
How common,and era?
They were very common after transistors were developed,'60s.Prior it was more audiophile equipment with portability (or its lack ) no doubt a factor.
Consumer tape was invariably 1/4" running at a max of 7 1/2" ips or halves thereof.Better sound quality is obtained with higher speeds and tape widths simply because more area could be magnetized.You could get two tracks in each direction,or four in one,on 1/4" tape.
Studio units ran at 30ips and were at least 1/2"tape.A friend's Ampex had 16 tracks,one way.
Some of the classic sounds of the '60s are reel to reel dependent,i.e. flanging,tape reverse and slap back.On a related note,Mellotrons and Chamberlins used magnetic tape.Pre-recorded combinations of instruments were available,3 tracks on 3/8" tape for the Mellotron.Dad has a reel to reel machine in storage in the house, with some reels of unknown content. He mentioned that you could record in layers on the equipment he had, so that you could play a few instruments and combine them.
Slight addendum to my prior post.The guitarist Les Paul was using tape speed and doubling effects in the '40s.
Nope–maybe he found it too confusing to figure out what’s on where because a reel doesn’t have anyplace to mark a side one or side two? Any rate, all his tapes were one side only but they’d hold hours worth of music…
True that, but the old tube receivers also gave better sound quality by a long shot. I seriously think the only reason they went out of fashion was having to wait for the tubes to warm up.
Cassettes did not produce high quality audio until the advent of Dolby B noise reduction. Like so many other innovations, the first high quality cassette recorder was created by Henry Kloss - Wikipedia.
I used them when I when I worked in radio in the 80’s and 90’s, much as described by acsenray.
But we also had some exotic uses for them. One was to use two side-by-side machines to broadcast in delay for call-in shows.
The first machine would record from our studio board, but the tape would not go onto a take-up reel. Instead it would be strung to the machine next to it and played over the air. By varying how far apart the two machines were, you could adjust the time delay. I believe we did about six seconds, and this gave us time to interrupt the tape if someone cursed or something.
That effect was later done by a special piece of hardware, later to be replaced by computers. But I always enjoyed the ingenuity of our “poor man’s” solution.