ACCENT ON EDITING

The Nagra T-Audio

Tape Decks at AES Since I used to do a lot of live recording, tape decks always catch my eye at AES conventions. Several caught it at the one in Anaheim, last October.

The one I fell in love with was the Nagra T-Audio, which I hadn't previously seen. For a 15-ips deck taking 10 1/2-inch reels, it's very compact and comparatively light (about 50 pounds, with transport case). It has a real-time (hour/minute/ second) tape counter. But what really got me were the editing facilities.

First, you have to find your edit point. For that, there are six "Skip" buttons, three for each direction. Pressing the single-arrow button makes the tape play (backwards, if you choose) at the normal speed (which can be anywhere from 3 3/4 to 30 ips). The double-arrow buttons play the tape at 30 ips, with a level drop of 6 dB to protect ears and tweeters. The triple-arrow buttons are conventional fast-forward and rewind ("conventional" means variable speed here). Release the "Skip" buttons, and the deck goes into play-useful, when editing.

Six more buttons and a knob make up the editing controls. One releases the brakes and motors so you can rock the tape over the heads; two more free one spool while leaving the other motor on at low power, for single-handed rocking. The rotary knob (more of a disc, actually) inches the tape backward and forward under capstan control. Another button spools discarded passages into the wastebasket. And the last one moves your chosen edit point directly over a built-in, manual scissors which cut the tape at a 45° angle.

Only one thing dissuaded me from carrying one home: Equipped as I've described it here, the T-Audio costs about $11,000. Oh, well ... .

Inching knobs seem to be a coming trend. There was a similar servo control built into the head blocks of Tascam's new Series 50 decks. These decks also have digital tape-time displays, built-in splicing blocks, and heads whose geometry reduces "head bumps" to less than 1 dB, according to Tascam. The two-track Model 52 weighs a little over 70 pounds and costs about $3,500, with dbx optional at extra cost. The half-inch, eight-track Model 58, of course, costs more.

Otari's 5050B-II is lighter (60 pounds) and less expensive ($2,295). And while it does not have the Tascam's inching knob, it does have a real-time counter, built-in splicing block, a dump-edit control, and balanced microphone inputs. It also has front-panel recording calibration settings, with a built-in test oscillator.

Studer's new A810 is big-league stuff; at $6,200, it's out of most amateurs' league. What interested me about it was the bank of 12 buttons at the lower left, by the real-time tape counter. You can choose which functions five of those buttons command, by programming internal switches. Typical functions for these buttons include tape dump, memory locations, fast-wind speed control, remote-control activation, SMPTE time-code (optional), and a fader. Audio parameters such as level, equalization and bias are digitally controlled, which means that all of them can be reset remotely. You can even run a bank of 810s under computer control, with each deck independently controllable.

Digital Demo--Finger-Walkin' Good

Need visual aids when explaining digital sound to your friends and neighbors? Steve Hase of Pioneer showed an easy one at a recent press conference: Walk your fingers over to the phone book, then bend it about as shown. The resultant curve, like some audio wave-shapes, is obviously made up of numerous tiny steps, the directory pages. The "sampling rate" and curve smoothness will obviously be higher if you have a fat, metropolitan phone book like this to work with than if you live in a small town in mid-Idaho, but the principle should work with other books if your local directory's too thin.

U.S. Companies Enter Compact-Disc Field

CBS Records will probably be the first U.S. record company to manufacture digital Compact Disc recordings, beginning in 1984. They'll also be the first major U.S. record company to sell the discs here, importing CBS/Sony CDs from Japan, early next year.

Will CBS be first of any U.S. record company? Perhaps. Their projected CD sales date is "the first quarter of 1983," while M & K RealTime Records expects to deliver imported pressings (from M & K's own masters) by February, smack in the middle of that quarter.

(adapted from Audio magazine, Feb. 1983)

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