The Great Consumer Heist

[cscottrun4it]

I've had a Teac ST-1250s laying about the house forgotten for the past year+. I received it as a gift, sort of. (The email I was given to post payment to via PayPal was apparently not associated with an account, and I could not raise the seller again.) But this "heist" isn't the subject of my post.

Over the weekend, I stumbled on a cache of reel tapes, so I set up the Teac, cleaned and demagnitized the heads, applied a little oil hither and yon, and made the connections.

I started with a recording of Holst's The Planets on Amex tape, 7 1/2 rpm. The tape is in great shape and the recording is great (Deutsche Grammophon). I then moved on to a childhood favorite: the Enoch Light Experience (just joking), Tabu. (It was the only record I could stand in my parent's record collection.) I bought the tape mostly because it is a two-track recording, and I was curious, and the content is pretty good up until the last track.

Without going into the listening details, I suddenly had a realization: the late 1990s and 2000s were the great consumer heist but not because of our apparent loss of the LP.

Many of us love to talk about the quality of analog recordings and playback. We talk about the lengths we go to so as to have a pop-free listening experience with our LPs. Some of us spend thousands of dollars on record cleaning machines, cartridges, stili, static management, surface cleaning products, high-quality sleeves, and other things I can't remember. I count myself among those who have gone to good, though not great, lengths to have a clean LP and stylus for each play. I've probably spent several hundred bucks to arrive at the process I use to help ensure a clean needle for my habit.

But the folks on this site are weird....

My daughter is happy to listen to records on a true "record player" because of the cool factor. Her listening world is that of the snap, crackle, and pop. (Her world is also Spotify, which I support because it allows her, and me, to explore new music before taking the plunge.)

Which brings me back to the great consumer heist: the CD, which I bought like they were going out of style in the 1990s. (I have about one thousand. Of course, I also have about the same number of LPs.) When I think about it, when I avoid my prejudice related to all things digital for serious listening, I realize the CD provided the nirvana sought by so many and achieved by so few: the scratchless record.

In the late 1980s, I had a Marantz 2222b, a Pioneer PL-15D MK-2, and a pair of Cerwin Vega HED speakers, all purchased by my parents and liberated by me. With such a set up, I could have gone far, but...

I am not part of the lucky audiophile sperm club. My dad knew jack about any of the audio toys he bought. I didn't have an uncle with a set of Altec speakers laying around and who knew the first thinges about impedance. None of my friends knew the first thing about setting up a turntable,. So I had my Pioneer dialed into 8 grams of plowing... er... tracking weight, antiskating to the Nth degree, all hooked to a stylus bought for as little money as I could spend to get a "diamond." (I do have an uncle that claims all of his LPs are in great shape because he only ever played them using a diamond needle. Of course it was the same diamond needle for 35 years, but hey, who's counting? He wasn't part of the lucky audiophile sperm club either, and his LPs sound like crap.)

My point here is, without proper education, the sort of education received through hours of reading on Audiokarma and studying with the professors thereon, every piece of vinyl you spin will be from my daughter's snap, crackle, and pop collection of records.

Enter the CD, aka the scratchless record (because all surface noise and stylus goop are scratches)! Low to mid-fi consumers, like me, flocked to stores to drop 35% more for the digital miricle. We could finally hear Glen Gould exhale after a Bach variation, Wynton Marsalis depress three valves in a row before beginning a solo, the deep harmonies of The Bungles as video killed the radio star. Anolog was in the rear view mirror, even when you bought an LP, which was likely marked "digitally recorded."

But we were duped, and I didn't realize how duped until the Enoch Light Experience rode into my man cave.

What we so hungerelly consumed in 1990 was actually on our consumer's table in 1962 - the open-faced, aka reel-to-reel, tape deck! How could we have missed it? My parents knew nothing about it. My friends parents knew nothing about it. I never even saw one until I was in high school and the band director had one he used to record our concerts. We thought he was weird.

But now, WTF man? You're telling me crisp, nose-free (like CDs) analog recordings were available to consumers ~30 years before the miricle of digitized music on a compact disk? How could that happen?

This weekend's OMG moment leaves me with some troubling questions:

1. How is it vinyl became the medium of choice, especially after 1960? Was reel to reel merely the Sony Beta to the LP's VHS?
2. Were people in the 70s tricked into thinking audiotape on reels sucked as much as tape enclosed in plastic cassettes? (I know - its the tape playback speed, not the tape, usually.)
3. Who out there is looking to resurrect the open-faced tape medium? If no one, why not?

I looked on the Bay Watch and see reel to reel tapes of music not associated with Mac Davis or Paul Anka can go for some pretty big bucks. (Pink Floyd Meddle for $8,000!?) Clearly I'm not the first to recognize the medium's strengths, and if you want to stop music piracy, reels seem like a pretty good way to go.

Making stupid consumer decisions is nothing new. The world will buy what it's sold. However, I like to think of those of us who appreciate music as being smarter than the average bear, but then I start worrying about all those quickly pressed LPs with apparently very little quality control. You know the ones - they screem ANOLOG IS KING! and they whisper this vinyl was pressed by monkeys working for Sony Music. These LPs make me wonder, Are we about to get fooled again? Or could the open-faced tape save us from such folly... Hmm.

 

[sqlsavior]

See the scene in Sleeper where Woody Allen tries to operate a wall-sized tape machine for the answer. Nerds were needed back then just to run projectors. R2R was for competent individuals, or "power users" in more recent terminology. Competent tape duplication in mass quantities was much more costly than record pressing, as well.

 

[ggregg]

Threading the tape man, threading the tape. Which is why 4 track, 8 track, and especially cassette was invented.

 

[sregor]

Also mass production. You can't pop a tape out of a press in less than a minute like a record or CD. Someone has to make those tapes. At least cassettes were easy to automate, but still took time and cost way more to produce. My 2 cents...

 

[kirk57]

Sure, we had R to R decks back in the 70's. But they were (and remain) a PIA to operate, select songs, etc. and prerecorded tapes were not all that common and expensive, so you were left with recording off your LPs or the radio, which is one generation down. When high quality cassette decks became available (our R to R was replaced by a Teac 450), the sound didn't suffer and it was MUCH easier to deal with.

R to R died as a consumer format for a reason.

 

[Condorsat]

I dabbled with Reel to Reel in 1984 ... as I recall, audio magazines were talking about how you could avoid buying a Reel to Reel by recording your music on Super VHS.

CD's were coming out & smaller stereo rigs (shelf systems) were starting to make their appearance (was living in the UK at the time).

Liked it at the time (threading tapes, watching it spin, the sound... etc) ... when I got back to the US ... I never took my Akai Reel to Reel out of the box ... it's stayed in the box since then.

Hind site being 20/20 ... Reel to Reel was the worst audio purchase I ever made ... I even got more use out of VHS , Cassette tapes and even LaserDiscs

As far as Redbook CD's ... as I recall (30 years ago) ... folks were so taken back by the lack of background noise (pops, click, crackle, tape hiss etc) ... that they were not even paying attention to the sound on a critical listening basis. Convenience over audio quality was how the market was heading ... or that's how it appeared to me at that time (some folks would say it's always been that way).

 

[BrocLuno]

Since I worked at GRT/Chess-Janus Records back in the 1970's I can talk to some of this. We would crank out maybe 10K cassettes, 25K worth of 8-tracks for every limited run of 100 Reel Recordings.

Sure, we'd put more effort into the reel dupes and the quality of the duplication masters was a cut above. But we made no money doing this... It was a loss leader for folks who were wired into the the world of high end sounds. You did this to keep your reputation as solid company in the audio business ... There were just not that many R2R decks sold.

The upside is that some of the stereo magazine types (editors, etc.) would preview music on R2R and comment about good recordings and such. The average Joe would buy that on cassette or 8-track

And, the above average Joe would be eye balling that Nakamichi or BIC T3 deck way before he'd be looking to buy a R2R ...

 

[sheltie dave]

Great Reel to reel decks were quite expensive back in the day, almost double an equal quality Tt. Ampex, Tandberg, Revox, and Scully were the prime rib, with Akai and eventually Teac filling the middle range.
Cheap decks were mainly dreck.

Most pre recorded tapes were average at best, until. You made it into Ampex land.

Blank tapes had the same quality issues except for the good Ampex. All the prerecorded tapes were more expensive than lps.

Used tapes were hard to find at stores. New tapes had only a limited selection.

If you made your own tapes, you effectively paid more than double the price...first you needed the new album to tape it.

You add all these things together, and there were vanishingly few people who went down your dream route.

 

[chadnliz]

Sure, we had R to R decks back in the 70's. But they were (and remain) a PIA to operate, select songs, etc. and prerecorded tapes were not all that common and expensive, so you were left with recording off your LPs or the radio, which is one generation down. When high quality cassette decks became available (our R to R was replaced by a Teac 450), the sound didn't suffer and it was MUCH easier to deal with.

R to R died as a consumer format for a reason.

EXACTLY!
Nobody was "duped", only audio nerds have a hard to grasping this.

 

[ggregg]

which is understandable. When I had my Revox RTR, I used it for "mixed" tapes, set in the order I wanted. The quality was quite good. Most any cassette deck, other than a high end Nak, could not even approach it. But it just didn't get enough use and I eventually sold it. Haven't ever really had the urge since, but I've not tripped into a cheap Revox (or comparable) again either. I got it for free.

That being said (I say that a lot), one of the best advantages of an RTR was the low noise floor without having to use Dolby or any other add on processor. I think most people just used Dolby (B) to goose the highs for decks that couldn't get them any other way. Record with it on, playback with it off. C and HX pro were better but a halfway decent RTR didn't need any of that.

Somebody mentioned recording with Super VHS. Actually it was VHS hi fi. The quality really was amazing but where else were you going to play the tape? I tried it once just to do it. Never did it again. It just seemed really odd to record audio on a video tape.

 

[hjames]

Reel to Reel tapes were just too pricey to consider seriously.
I managed Scully-Metrotech R-R machines at the campus radio station - but not at home.
I bought Import albums for better quality sound, duped to high end cassettes on first play,
and as soon as CDs came out with good fidelity, I never looked back.
That was no HEIST in my mind ...

 

[DougMac]

Santa brought me my first reel to reel in 1964 when I was 13. Two years later I upgraded to a Viking 87 Pro. I still have tapes I made on those machines.

I still have the Viking, but it needs to be restored. In addition I have 3 Teacs, including an X1000R and a sweet little Akai with glass ferrite heads. The X1000 and Akai are connected to my home office system/audio restoration bench.

Why wasn't RTR a much bigger player? Here's my experience and observations.

First, commercial RTR tapes were much more expensive than their LP counterpart. There was no good reproduction method to mass produce tapes. The yield was a fraction of the yield of the same record on LP. Good tape decks were also more expensive than equivalent turntables. The decks were mechanically more complex than a turntable and could potentially require more servicing.

The sound quality of a 7 1/2 ips commercial tape could come close to but not equal LPs, even using a high quality deck, such as Tandburg or Revox. Those who would be inclined to own an expensive tape deck were also inclined to own a good turntable with a good cartridge. They also tended to take much better than average care of their records. I have records I bought as a teenager that play virtually noise free. What you lost in clicks and pops by going to tape, you gained in hiss and even sometimes print through. Too many commercial recordings were released at 3 3/4 ips. These tapes really sound bad, much worse than LP's or even well manufactured cassettes.

While records can be easily damaged if not handled carefully, tapes were not immune from physical damage. They could break during rewinding, especially in the days before solenoid controlled transport. If the deck wasn't aligned properly, especially using fast forward or rewind, the tape could suffer edge damage. While rare, you could still suffer from dropouts. I have an LP copy of "Second Winter" by Johnny Winter. There's a dropout during "Memory Pain" that I'm sure is from a tape defect. I hear the same defect in digital versions.

Because of the above reasons, I bought very few commercial tapes growing up. I'd rather buy the LP, then transcribe to tape. Most of my tapes are transcriptions or playlists.

I don't buy in to the conspiracy theory that evil marketing and engineers cooked up CD's just to foist inferior sound quality on the unsuspecting public. What I see is good old capitalism. CDs solved a lot of use problems when handled with a modicum of care. They overtook LPs and cassettes because they did a lot of things better than either. RTR never was in the running.

 

[KentTeffeteller]

Good open reel machines cost serious money in the day. Often as much as a budget integrated or receiver, a decent record changer with magnetic cartridge, and a pair of good budget 2 way speakers. And not every title was available pre-recorded. Good blank open reel tape cost often as much as an LP in the 1965-1975 time frame. Remember that a good machine was $400 or more, and good blank tape for 1,800 feet was nearly $5. Pre-recorded open reel titles in this era listed for $6.99-$7.99 and not discounted and usually special order. When LP was often $4.99 or less discounted.

 

[EchoWars]

I don't buy in to the conspiracy theory that evil marketing and engineers cooked up CD's just to foist inferior sound quality on the unsuspecting public. What I see is good old capitalism. CDs solved a lot of use problems when handled with a modicum of care. They overtook LPs and cassettes because they did a lot of things better than either. RTR never was in the running.

+1

Accidental erasure, bleed-through, tape breakage, dropouts, head wear, complex mechanicals, oxide shedding...

CD's have the potential to obliterate LP's and tape in the SQ dept., and every once in awhile I actually manage to buy a CD that does exactly that.

I get it if you're not fond of CD's, but the medium itself isn't where the blame lies if that's the case.

 

[kirk57]

Many thanks to Doug for remembering a whole bunch of other R to R ills I'd forgotten about!

 

[Raynald]

+1

Accidental erasure, bleed-through, tape breakage, head wear, complex mechanicals, oxide shedding...

CD's have the potential to obliterate LP's and tape in the SQ dept., and every once in awhile I actually manage to buy a CD that does exactly that.

I get it if you're not fond of CD's, but the medium itself isn't where the blame lies if that's the case.

Some very good points. Consumers buy things for their own reasons. If they want something that sounds good enough and is convenient, that is what they will buy. This has been pretty constant through the decades with audio. If we forced them to put up with expensive and inconvenient formats because other people preferred them they would feel far worse than duped.

Amen on CDs. Most sound mediocre to bad which is what makes many audiophiles rank the medium lower than others but I have heard enough spectacular sounding ones to think it is not the medium. An individual item cannot sound better than the format it is played on. If the format can sometimes sound great, the problem is elsewhere. But EW and I digress.

 

[Condorsat]

+1

CD's have the potential to obliterate LP's and tape in the SQ dept., and every once in awhile I actually manage to buy a CD that does exactly that.

I get it if you're not fond of CD's, but the medium itself isn't where the blame lies if that's the case.

Amen on CDs. Most sound mediocre to bad which is what makes many audiophiles rank the medium lower than others but I have heard enough spectacular sounding ones to think it is not the medium. An individual item cannot sound better than the format it is played on. If the format can sometimes sound great, the problem is elsewhere.

I would agree as well ... some Redbook CD's I've owned sound exceptional ... it's just damn shame it's the exception rather than the rule.

Kind of reminds me of a Football game where one team has all the stats on their side and still end up loosing the game that should not have even been close

 

[restorer-john]

EW's points are all spot on.

Quite frankly, the almost religious zeal that people attack the CD format with these days is funny to watch. In terms of consistency of the media quality, durability, ubiquity and ultimate repeatable performance, you'd have to be utterly crazy to deny it was the greatest and most successful contributor to the evolution of true high fidelity playback in the home or anywhere else for that matter. The HiFi industry was on life-support until CD came along.

There was no 'Great Consumer Heist'. People wanted better, much better. Better in every, single parameter. There is no denying that- it is 100% fact. The format delivered in spades and continues to deliver.

A very wise HiFi owner once told my father "It's the moving parts, sir, that wear and cause the problems". Simple but so true. As time goes on and gear gets older, most of my repairs are shifting from electronic failures to electro-mechanical failures or just mechanical failures.

A CD player can have just one conventional motor and even that can be a BSL DD spindle motor. The tracking can be a linear motor (no bearings or shafts or brushes to wear) and the loading mechanism can be dispensed with for a simple magnetic puck. A CD player can be designed to outlast practically any other playback device. The only device I would expect to outlast a well designed CD player is a ROM based solid state player (not some SMD based flash/hdd based xPod). There's a reason the early Philips/Marantz swing arm CDM1 based machines are still going- they simplified any and all moving parts and made them ultra high quality. The optics and laser assembly are of military standard. They will outlast me.

RTR is full of hundreds of moving parts, that all wear, go out of alignment and directly negatively affect the sound. The heads wear, the pinch rollers dry out and crack, the capstans rust etc.

You want a turntable to last forever? Buy a manual DD, no linkages, levers, grease and lubrication to dry out, springs and toggles to break, plastic cams and gears to snap etc. It's the manual TTs that are the classics, not the fully automatic fiascos that did everything and ended up decades later, doing nothing except residing happily under 10ft of dirt in a landfill.

I would offer these answers to your questions:

• Vinyl became the format of choice in the 1960s because of the microgroove (the LP). It offered 22 minutes a side or so at reasonable quality. RTR was for the professional recordists, the amateurs who wished they were, and the guys making recordings of their kids reading poems or steam trains rushing by their back fence.
  
• No one was 'tricked' about fidelity. Cassette was small, convenient and cheap. You could play it in your car, on a portable, in your home or at work on the secretaries' dictation machines. It was ubiquitous.
• I've got several RTR machines, big TEACs, a few Revoxs, a lovely Akai and a couple of Sonys (which need work). They are all except one, 10.5" NAB size and I love to play with them now and then. They sound good, but what can I record on them that does justice to the fidelity the format is capable of? Yes, that's right, my CDs. And what's the point? None. They sit in my storeroom mothballed. The only 'resurrection' may be a temporary 'glitch' when the hipster movement decides they need to archive their rapidly wearing out new 'vinyls' on something equally 'analog' and 'retro'. That's when I'll dig out my RTRs and make a killing.

 

[Hermit418]

No one has mentioned the change in the adhesive that happened in the late 1970's or the change to how well the ferrite particles were staying on the reformulated tape to the more modern polyvinyl compounds then to the the current what passes for recording tape today. the entire industry was forced to change the "glues" and the tape compositions as well. When Ampex were receiving tapes returned to the stores due to "drop=outs" and not just from consumers, recording engineers were noticing this very early on. The new adhesives weren't allowing the bonding of the magnetic particles fully and evenly causing sections of tape to have spaces of no magnetic particles to some portion of length where nothing was sticking.

Akai tried to remedy the issue with their GLASS FERRITE heads so no direct contact with the tape was made hoping the particles would not come off and stick to the head, it helped but the tape was by then much different in quality than what was made and sold previously. The changes with the problems of drop outs, the separation issues of the new tapes verses the old tapes along with the capstan and head cleaning problems increased.

I know engineers who guard their original tapes because they can't get the same quality and the newer recording are like JPEGS as each time the tapes pass the head and are played it degrades the recording more and more on the newer tapes verses those older and better quality tape transfers, leaving the user with a gradually decaying roll of lossy music

The technology tried to recover by using DAT tapes which are different in their manufacture but those tapes are based upon a different type of transfer and won't work up to the standards along with their size simply will not fit the play back or recording head spacing.

All in all R 2 R was great during its time but now you simply can't get new quality tape that will perform like the older formulated tapes. today 3M and Ampex is a shade of its former glory and it is sad as I have had R @ R machines and with a quality recording from the late 50s and 60, even into the 1970s were still using the old formulations with those tapes stored properly still work nicely today over 50-60 years after they were made. only a record can equal that longevity and we will have to wait to see if CD and DVDs do too when their anniversary rolls around.

It is too bad we can't figure out a solution to make a solid long lasting recording medium on a tape that will work and not lose information nor degrade over time.

Thanks for the topic been some time since I last had a chance to remember this bit of trivial information and why the R 2 R died. It really hasn't completely and it could be resurrected if enough interest like vinyl was shown to make it a profitable endeavor along with a faster way to duplicate the tapes were developed.

Cheers
Hermit

 

[petehall347]

they made D.A.T and sold us cassettes .
they made Betamax and sold us VHS
then mini-disk never took off .
cd is damn good played on the right player .
records are best though .
if you dont want crackles or pops etc go see a live band play .