by Bert Whyte
IN 1974, THE long-playing, 33 1/3-rpm record celebrated its 25th anniversary. It is, of course, the prime medium for recorded music and an economic giant.
Now, in 1976, open-reel recorded tape has reached its 25th anniversary and, sad to say, has fallen on parlous times.
Twenty-five years ago, I was, in essence, the mid-wife at the birth of open-reel music tape. I was with Magnecord at the time, and negotiated a pact with George Mendelssohn, President of Vox Records (who was as venturesome then as he is today), to produce open-reel recordings which we called "Magnecordings by Vox." The tapes were, of course, monophonic, at 7 1/2 ips, full track, although I seem to recall we issued some half-track tapes as well. The signal-to-noise ratio was a snappy 48 dB, but they were duped one-to one, using a battery of Magnecords as slave units. The tape masters were of European origin, on huge 14-in. reels, and the tape oxide was a bilious yellow which shed all too easily. Even back then, we were ambitious enough to turn out such items as Otto Klemperer and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra performing the Mahler 2nd Symphony.
A little later, a few small companies produced some mono tapes. Then RCA got into the act, producing mono tapes they called "orthophonic," and not long after that Livingston and Concert Hall Society produced the first stereo tapes. Finally, in 1954 RCA issued the first "major company" stereo tapes, and open-reel music tapes were well and truly launched. Columbia, Vanguard, Mercury and other companies issued stereo tapes. Ampex created United Stereo Tapes and became a major factor in the business. Quite a respectable catalog of pop and classical tapes was built up, and sales of half-track stereo tapes had reached about $7 million per year, when the stereo disc was introduced in 1958.
Although the technical quality of the early stereo discs left a great deal to be desired, they had one very significant advantage over the stereo tapes, and that was that they were far lower in price. Consider the fact that a stereo tape of the Tchaikovsky 6th Symphony cost as much as $18.95 versus $5.95 for the same music on stereo disc, and you can understand why there was a rapid erosion of the sale of stereo tapes. As the quality of the stereo discs improved, the sales of stereo tapes decline even more drastically.
Why the big price differential between tape and disc? You must remember that the stereo tapes were made in what we call today "halftrack" stereo, that is two channels played back in one direction from supply reel to take-up reel. Thus, if a piece of music was 46 minutes in duration, it was necessary to use a length of tape that would give you this running time at 7 1/2 ips. The tape reel alone cost more than the basic disc pressing, to say nothing of the sheer mechanical and handling complexities of tape duplicating, with their subsequent higher labor costs.
As the stereo disc gained momentum, there came a period when the stereo tape market was so depressed, that none of the companies issued new releases for many months.
Finally, when the stereo tape market was at its very nadir, Ampex came to the rescue by introducing the quarter-track stereo tape. In this configuration, there are four tracks interleaved with appropriate guard bands, with one set of stereo tracks (1 and 3) running from supply reel to take-up reel, and at the conclusion of the first pass or "side," the reels are reversed and the other set of stereo tracks (2 and 4) are played. Naturally, at the conclusion of the second pass, the tape has wound onto its original reel and is once again ready for playback.
Of course, each set of stereo tracks is derived by approximately halving each track of the original two-channel format. Thus, for any given amount of playing time, the quarter-track stereo format requires but half the length of tape that would be necessary in the half-track stereo format. Evidently, the cost of the duplicating tape was a major factor in the overall costs of producing stereo tapes, so when the tape requirements were halved by adoption of the quarter-track format, Ampex was able to substantially reduce the price of its stereo tapes. To be sure, they were still more expensive than their counterparts on disc, but the differential was relatively modest.
The adoption of the quarter-track stereo format was a much needed stimulus to the open-reel tape market, but it was not without its problems. First and foremost was that tape decks needed a playback head of the proper configuration to reproduce the new tapes. The tape machine manufacturers were quick to jump into the breach, but it still! was some time before large numbers of the units were in the hands of the con sumers. Then there was the irksome problem of inter-channel crosstalk.
To give an example, when playing stereo pair of tracks 1 and 3, the stereo pair of tracks 2 and 4 are going by the head backwards. If there is insufficient isolation between the pairs at an unfortunate juxtaposition, such that a pianissimo section is being played while a fortissimo section on the other pair of tracks is passing at the same instant, there will be leakage and the sound of tracks 2 and 4 will be heard backwards, superimposed on tracks 1 and 3.
Many people have thought that this crosstalk is the fault of the tape duplication. In the earlier days of the quarter-track stereo format, the fault lay usually in the playback head, where the crosstalk was the result of a transformer coupling phenomenon between adjacent pairs of head stacks.
Improvements in head design have eliminated most of this crosstalk problem, but it still crops up in certain tape decks. A typical stereo playback head these days should have isolation between channels of better than 50 dB, and providing the playback is not at very elevated levels beyond the usual domestic situation, crosstalk shouldn't be bothersome.
Within two years after the adoption of the quarter-track stereo format, open-reel tape was prospering. Ampex reorganized its operations and formed Ampex Stereo Tapes. Under this umbrella, Ampex turned out open-reel stereo tapes for a multitude of record companies. Many other companies independently produced open reel tapes. It is claimed that by 1966, open-reel tape sales were running at an annual rate of $36 million.
In 1974, this figure had shrunk to about $2 million a year. What had happened once again to bring open reel tape to this low estate? It is hard to say. Certainly there were continuous improvements in the stereo disc, which undoubtedly cut into tape sales. Probably, a lot of people were satisfied with the quality of the cassette format, especially when Dolbyized, and moved out of open reel.
It must be admitted that, with all of the advantages of open reel tapes, the omnipresent and ongoing problem of tape hiss turned many people away from open-reel tape.
Ampex addressed itself to allaying the hiss problem by coming up with better duplicating tape and more sophisticated methods of tape processing, as witness their Ampex 2 tapes and then their EX-Plus tapes. As readers of this column know, I long and loudly championed the idea of Dolby B processing for open-reel tape, and finally Ampex capitulated. Eureka! thought we had it made and the tape millennium had arrived. The first examples of the Ampex Dolby B tapes were very promising with that old bugaboo tape hiss finally laid to rest. Alas, the ongoing program has been inconsistent. Some tapes are fine, others, while free of hiss, have other defects, most commonly what sounds like tape saturation and a compressed sound. A visit to Ampex in Elk Grove revealed that in production an automated tape level sensor was in use, and it is possible the level threshold was set too high so that the red "no-go" light came on too late. Then there were Dolby B tapes, that in spite of this processing, still had tape hiss. This wasn't the fault of Ampex, since a number of Dolby A masters sent to them by their record company clients were not made from Dolby A originals, and therefore had the tape hiss of the "straight" originals. While Ampex was producing 8-track cartridges and cassettes by the skillion, open-reel sales continued to decline. Then there was a management reshuffling at Ampex Stereo Tapes, and, after a while, the announcement that Ampex was getting out of the pre-recorded tape business. At first it appeared as if Ampex would continue to duplicate tapes, but have the business of selling and distributing the tapes handled by their record company clients. Although it is hard to find out what is really happening, it now appears that they will get out of open-reel processing altogether. Period. I assure you that there are plenty of die-hard open-reel enthusiasts to whom this is very bad news indeed.
Enter at this bleak moment, the firm of Barclay-Crocker, of 11 Broadway, New York. Tony Barclay and John Crocker are two enterprising gentlemen, who several years ago decided to go into the business of selling open-reel tapes exclusively. They published a catalog of open-reel tapes, and six times a year, a supplement of new releases and chatty information about music and tape matters, which they call Reel News. As you can imagine, with Ampex Stereo Tapes their principal supplier of product, the news of the imminent demise of the Ampex operation was a real shocker! After mulling over the situation for awhile, and reasoning that there are an awful lot of people with open-reel tape machines, and that the sale of high-quality tape decks has been in an upward curve for some years now, they have courageously decided to go into the open-reel tape duplicating business themselves.
Thus, they have purchased as a starter, an Ampex master playback unit and several slaves. They are lining up all their ancillary equipment such as Dolby A Units and Dolby 320 B generator, etc. They are retaining the services of Harold Kovner, a well-known engineer versed in tape duplication procedures, and Jerry Bruch, a recording engineer of considerable renown, who has been associated with the fine Unicorn recordings. I have acted as a consultant to them in the initial set-up and will do the master evaluation for them. They are determined to run a ultra high-quality operation. For example, the duping tape will be the equivalent of Scotch 177 Dynarange or better. Then the running master will run at 60 ips and the slaves at 30 ips, so the resultant 7 1/2-ips copies will be at a relatively low 2-to-1 duping ratio and should be virtually indistinguishable from the master. At present they are busy trying to line up the various record companies to convince them to enter agreements for the production of open-reel tapes. It is their intent to try for London, DGG, RCA, Columbia, Phillips, Vanguard, and Vox as their principal clients.
Needless to say, more power to them! If they can maintain the stringent quality-control procedures they have imposed on their operation, open reel tapes will have a new lease on life.
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