TAPE GUIDE (Jun. 1990)

A Tangential Question

Q. Which would you buy to begin a stereo system: A receiver or a separate tuner, preamp, and power amp? (Price is important.)

-Eddie Crawford; Tuscaloosa, Ala.

A. While your question is not directly related to tape recording, it is a pivotal question for audiophiles, and I would like to answer it. I vote for a receiver, particularly if price is important. In fact, I might vote for a receiver even if price were a secondary consideration, because good-quality receivers today can pretty much rival the performance of separate components. Another important advantage, in many cases, is that a receiver saves space. Considering that one may need room for a CD player, turntable, cassette deck, and quite possibly other components--particularly signal processors--it may be quite a boon to combine three components into one chassis.

Reel vs. Cassette

Q. I am using an old open-reel deck for recording and playing old radio programs. My format is similar to that of other collectors: I tape four mono tracks onto a single reel. I can really pack a lot of shows--12 half-hour programs--onto an 1,800-foot reel at 3 3/4 ips, and using white-box tape enables me to get by very cheaply.

The point of all this is: By saving a few dollars on tape right now, am investing time and money in a dead technology? I could record these shows onto cassette in a similar manner--four separate mono tracks--but I worry about not having enough tape to cover a show and being vulnerable to tape dropout. I know my present deck will eventually stop working, and I worry about the availability of open-reel decks, at least in my price range. Will new open-reel decks still be available in 10 years? While my collection is small at this time--about 50 reels--I can see the possibility of eventually having several hundred reels dedicated to old radio shows. What are your views on the question of open reel versus cassette for my expanding library?

-Steve Mallon, Chicago, Ill.

A. I am inclined to believe that open-reel decks, including those intended for home use, will be with us for a considerable time-likely beyond 10 years. After all, they provide substantial advantages over cassette decks, such as higher quality (although the difference may be hard to discern when you are dealing with top-flight cassette decks), ease of editing, longer operating time in a single tape direction, better tape motion, and so on.

On the other hand, as you recognize, the prices of "good" open-reel decks are well above those of "good" cassette decks. If we extrapolate into the future, we can expect the price differential to increase. Therefore, I am inclined to advise you to shift to cassettes. While your open-reel deck is still in good repair, you can dub onto cassettes. For $300 or less, you should be able to get all the quality you need for your purpose, possibly even better than your open-reel deck's.

The disadvantage of cassettes is that you will get much less recording time per tape. If you use C-120 cassettes--which now yield quite satisfactory results, according to a number of readers--you will get two hours per cassette, instead of the six-plus hours that an 1,800-foot open reel provides at 3 3/4 ips. However, this disadvantage is partly overcome by the fact that a cassette takes up considerably less storage space than does a 7-inch reel.

I am puzzled by your statement about recording four mono tracks onto cassette, however. Possibly an exception exists, but none of the cassette decks I know of permit recording one track at a time. They record two (stereo) tracks in one direction and then two in the other. If a deck could record one track at a time, or if you could modify a deck to do so, you would have a problem: Tracks one and two are very close together, and so are tracks three and four. Hence, you will tend to have adjacent-channel spill over between tracks one and two and between tracks three and four. Such spillover doesn't matter much with stereo--particularly since it occurs mostly at low frequencies--but it would be quite annoying with two unrelated mono tracks.

(Source: Audio magazine, Jun. 1990, HERMAN BURSTEIN)

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