You’re only missing about 8 notes!
Excuse my ignorance, but what is RTR?
Reel to reel. Super expensive hobby. But pretty cool to look at!
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And even better to listen to!
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Amen to that! Awesome sound quality.
Really? I’ve no experience of prerecorded reel to reel (only laying down tracks in the 80s.) But I’d have though that there’d be noticeable hiss, wow and flutter, and high speed copying would affect resolution. CD was always better in that regard. What’s changed?
Ah, OK, of course, thanks. My father owned a Revox a77 many years ago. Brilliant machine!
Assuming we are talking about Tape Project tapes, they are recorded at 15ips, 1/4″ half track stereo tape using the IEC playback curve, which is very different than old pre-recorded tapes. The duplication process begins with the actual analog master tape. From that they make analog running masters in one inch two-track format. The one inch tape format transfer results in an extremely low loss of information, which they consider more like 1/2 generation than one full generation copy. These running masters are copied in real time to a bank of finely tweaked Ampex ATR-100 decks, yielding a “1-1/2 generation” copy. Just like with turntables, things like hiss and wow & flutter do not affect a properly setup and calibrated R2R deck. I’ve have heard a number of these at various audio shows and they almost always sound better than any other source, regardless of the system.
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There are a number of sources for direct copies of master tapes made recently. They are 10" reels running 1/4" two-track tape at 15 inches per second (ips) using IEC playback. The TapeProject is one, Yarlung Records, International Phonograph (IP), Acoustic Sounds, many more. Checkout United Home Audio’s website for a complete list. If you are a fan of the download source High Definition Tape Transfer, you can buy hi-rez transfers of several IP tapes.
They are expensive, but I believe you can’t get better sound. Except for live music of course.
The problem I face with RTR is the spare part situation.
Most machines were produced in the 1980s or earlier…
I own a Studer A 807 and in my experiene it got more difficult to find parts in recent years.
As good as the sound is, I think there is no real future for RTR.
I used to own over 200 Vinyl and few hundred of cassette tapes, mainly recorded from FM radio during my younger days. I own Nakamichi CR7 tape deck and CEC BD-2200 belt-driven turntable. I started to switch to CD in the early 90’s while SACD from 2000 onwards.
I still miss the good old days of analogue sound…
I still love digging out the old ‘table, and the ceremony of getting out the old albums from the basement, complete with documentation and pictures on real paper, lifting the shiny disk out of the jewel box, putting it in the tray, pressing play and hearing that lovely sound come pouring out of the speakers. Even though it is less convenient than Roon, there is a charm with the antiquity of CDs…
Oh, wait, what are we talking about?
I lent my turntable to my dad around 15 years ago and have been digital ever since.
There are still boxes of LPs in the loft that and having seen this recently, they may get another airing:
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Hi all,
Here in the UK, FM radio transmissions have been carried to transmitters on digital links since the early 80s. I presume they have upgraded the system since, but when it started it was 32kHz sampling using 13bit LPCM to deliver a 15kHz bandwidth. Those ‘good old days’ of analogue sound on FM radio were some way further back in time…
Even then, I recall severe criticism from the hi-fi comics around the huge amount of Optimod compression used on the music (Even on classical music on Radio 3). It was the start of the ‘Make everything louder than everything else’ loudness war, that later spread to CD production.
Ah, reel-to-reel… I bought a Revox A77 back in 1969 for the princely sum of £187 and 19 shillings. That was a huge amount of money to me in those days. Lugged it back and forth to university, and used it to record live music and BBC Proms and plays off the radio. Finally sold it in 2006 (for more than I paid for it) after transmuting all my tapes into digital form. It was a great machine.
I have a bigger investment in my vinyl system (2000+ albums) Linn LP12, CJ MV70 amp, Rogue RP1 preamp w/phonostage) than I do in my digital system (1000 albums through Roon to Denon AVR /SONOS endpoints) but I listen more to digital than vinyl throughout the week because of easier access to the music.
I avidly collect RCA Living Stereo / Mercury Living Presence albums, as well as selected jazz (already have most of the rock I want).
I’m considering whether to get into high resolution audio including MQA. Will evaluate if I can hear the quality difference.
I don’t use any of the streaming services except Pandora.
Bob C
BTW, I have asked Roon to consider developing a mechanism to allow us to track our non-digital sources (including vinyl) so we could see in all the forms we have Dark Side of the Moon (regular digital, high res, vinyl). As a listener (and buyer of music) I want to know if I have a copy of an album in any form before I make the decision to go buy another copy.
Bob C
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good luck!
I never knew the early 80’s they use digital source to transmit through FM carriers. I only came to know about DAB(Digital Audio Broadcasting). I still believe the early 80’s many radio stations still use vinyl and analogue tapes for playing back. CD was just in its infancy so it is not widely used until late 80’s or early 90’s
So did I , superb machine but 10.5 in tapes took up a lot of space. I moved on to a Nakamichi CR7 a really superb cassette deck