When I acquire second hand tapes I always have a listen to them before erasure and re use.
No long lost classic John Peel sessions have come my way, yet, but this pair are better than the Pet Shop Boys and Barry Manilow which graced my last acquisition.
What we have here are a couple of old but excellent condition EMI 7″ 1800 ft 1/4″ tapes.
I loaded the first into my Sony TC-377 and, without changing any settings, selected play. A bit of a cacophony to be honest. Then I clocked that the left and right channels bore no relationship to each other.
The 377 has separate left and right channel monitor switches so I was able to mute each side in turn and hear the two glorious mono recordings which shared the tape. Sound was clear and hiss free. No sign of the dreaded sticky tape syndrome either. This stuff is worth listening to.
The previous owner had helpfully documented what was recorded on the back of the box. A 1/4″ Tape like this typically has four tracks. Usually they are used as a stereo pair in one direction and another in the other. The owner of this tape has chosen to use them as four mono tracks. He has identified the sides as “green” and “red”. This colour coding corresponds to the colour of the leader tape which is attached to either end of the recording tape to prevent damage by handling. Various conventions are used by tape manufacturers for the colours of leader tape. A common convention is green for the “lead in” tape, indicating the start of side 1, and red for the “tails”, indicating the start of side 2. What would normally be left and right channels are identified as 1 and 2.
So, on side 1 (green) left channel (1) we have a recording of Sammy Davies Jnr. The right channel(2) has Sarah Vaughan. On Side 2(red) left(2) channel we have Oscar Peterson, with “two of a mind” on the right channel. helpfully the tape speed, 7 1/2 ips is also indicated.
The second tape also had a selection of Jazz, and utilised all four tracks for mono recordings. This time though different speeds have been used for different recordings. On the “green” side we have June Christy recorded on the left channel at 3 3/4 ips. After this is a couple of Dave brubeck recordings from the Newport Jazz Festival 1957 and a Sammy Davis Jr TV show from June 1060. These date the tape I think. The right channel has “improvised meditations and excursions”. This time at 7 1/2 ips.
These tapes do illustrate the versatility of the reel to reel format. Fidelity can be traded of for duration by selecting a different speed and you don’t need to use the stereo tracks for Stereo. Nice though my TC-377 is, it isn’t a particularly high end or sophisticated machine, but it still has the facilities to perform complex combinations like this. I do wonder what machine these were originally recorded on.
Interesting though this is, it’s not the most convenient for day to day use. I converted them to Mono recordings on MiniDisc. By selecting the appropriate speed and monitor switch settings on the 377 I was able to play each recording in turn into a MiniDisc recorder. The latter was set to record in mono. It will also play back the same signal through both left and right channels, which is nice.