[Coco] Importing CCRs

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 29 March 2007, Arthur Flexser wrote:
>On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Wednesday 28 March 2007, Chester A Patterson wrote:
>> >Wasn't there a wire as storage media in there somewhere way back
>> > when?
>>
>> Yes, in the 40's.  It died a deserving death with the introduction of
>> tape.  Then when tape went plastic, we used the paper version for a
>> funeral pyre.
>
>Are you saying that, prior to the advent of plastic, paper tape was
> somehow used for audio recording?  (Maybe you're referring to piano
> rolls, or some similar scheme for activating notes on a player, as
> opposed to actual audio?)
>
>Art

Yes I am Art.  The first 'tape' recorders used a rouge coating (to get the 
iron in a fine grain condition for the higher frequencies) on one side of 
a 1/4" wide kraft paper tape.  Between the surface roughness of the kraft 
paper (your basic brown paper bag paper) and the lack of an exciting bias 
field, the recordings were poorer technically than even todays $10 
machine can do.  Head life was often less than 500 hours due to the 
highly abrasive nature of the rouge too.  When the advent of an AC 
magnetic bias was discovered, which linearized the magnetic properties, 
the distortion dropped from 80% to 5% in one swell foop, with an 
accompanying improvement in the noise ratio by about 20 db.  Then it was 
found that any harmomic distortion in this high frequency bias (running 
at 80 to 120 khz) also had a pronounced effect on the background hiss and 
by the time they were done finetuning that and the tape coatings, we have 
bidirectional stereo recordings at 3.75 ips with 15khz top ends and 60 db 
snr's.  And distortions were gradually lowered, while peak recording 
volumes which in the 50's were hard clipped at maybe 6 db above the 2% 
distortion level, to almost 16db above the 2% distortion levels.  2% was 
generally where the VU meters were calibrated to show 100%.

The pinnacle of that development would have to be a Panasonic reel to reel 
made in about 1980 that was a one size fits all broadcast machine, doing 
22 khz for the top end at 7.5ips 65 db snr & capable of burning an audio 
signal into the tape so much louder than any other machine extant that I 
thought I ought to be able to see it on the back of the tape.  The model 
number was RS-1500-U, and had not Panasonic been so proud of it, it would 
have replaced all the Studer/Revox etc stuffs being used in automation 
systems all over the world.  But two things kept it as a niche item.

1, Panasonic didn't understand the control requirements of the market and 
treated its remote control socket on the back as proprietary info and the 
remote controls they had weren't usable for an automation system at all. 
And they intended to keep it that way when they priced the service manual 
at $500.  And $600 for a remote pendant on a 15 foot cable for those too 
lazy to push the machines own buttons.  And IIRC it didn't include a 
record button.

2. $2.2k in 1980 would buy another Studer/Revox, and the people writing 
the checks _knew_ who Studer/Revox was, where Panasonic was just a $2.7k 
wannabe their engineers were going goofy over.  The same attitude that 
says nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, wrote checks for the Studer's.

If I could still buy quality tape for it, which we can't now, I'd still 
cut a check $500 for one that hadn't been butchered by some tech even if 
I had to replace every head in it, there were 6 IIRC because it could do 
half track stereo, or be switched to 1/4 track bidirectional, doing a 
full 8 hours of broadcast quality audio on one 10.5" nab hubbed roll of 
tape at 3.75 ips.  Even with those big reels, turnaround time at the end 
of that side was only 3 seconds.  An ID + time & temp cart covered that.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
One man's Mede is another man's Persian.
		-- George M. Cohan