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Now this is a hobby I will get murdered for. No risk, no reward I say. I bought my first ever reel to reel over the weekend, Aiwa TP1003. Hasn’t arrived yet. I have no idea what I’m doing but Revox B77 will be mine at some point shortly. Has anyone else gone full Reel? There’s something amazing about top end reels doing 80mb per second, while 96k/24bit audio FLAC is about 1/10 of that in equivalent data speed.

Has anyone got any reels? Very keen to learn more.

Pics to follow

Static has a beautiful machine, and some cracking open-reel goodies

I’ve got an Akai GX-630D, and a stack of prerecorded tapes and some handmades as well. I can snap some pics later.

Open reel can sound very, very good. Be sure to clean the heads and pinch roller at a minimum before you get rolling.

Welcome to the club @Max :)

@Max
Here are some reels for sale in Japan containing a BBC Led Zeppelin recording:

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/n345759904

only 275,000 yen :-)

@bez shit the bed! I saw invisible isvisible have a reel out too on discogs. Surprising any artists can afford to put stuff out

You'll *definately* want to watch this if you dig reel to reel...

Wild!

https://thevinylfactory.com/films/magne ... -ensemble/

@spun that is awesome stuff
@static that looks like a great machine. Do you use a mix desk to input to 4 tracks? Or direct from an amplifier?

My little one arrived from Belgrade. The speakers detach, they are tiny 0.1W! The tape probably has a family singing on it, but as a piece from the Soviet side I suspect someone may have died in order this be purchased!

maxlevel wrote: ↑Sat May 25, 2019 8:08 am @spun that is awesome stuff
@static that looks like a great machine. Do you use a mix desk to input to 4 tracks? Or direct from an amplifier?

My little one arrived from Belgrade. The speakers detach, they are tiny 0.1W! The tape probably has a family singing on it, but as a piece from the Soviet side I suspect someone may have died in order this be purchased!

;-)

@scojo that looks like a giant woody harlsson!

Been amazed today, you can get some great little Sony units for under £200.

@Max it’s 4 track in that it has L & R moving in both directions. So two stereo recordings, one on each side.

I record through a dbx encoder. Mostly from my computer and sometimes vinyl or sacd.

maxlevel wrote: ↑Sat May 25, 2019 8:08 am @spun that is awesome stuff
@static that looks like a great machine. Do you use a mix desk to input to 4 tracks? Or direct from an amplifier?

My little one arrived from Belgrade. The speakers detach, they are tiny 0.1W! The tape probably has a family singing on it, but as a piece from the Soviet side I suspect someone may have died in order this be purchased!

Nice one @Max! Looking forward to see how many reel to reel decks you will have acquired in 12 months time :-)

Currently looking at Nagra IV machines, as well as a handful of cheapo Sony units. Dosnt seem to be any B-77 in any kind of reasonable price range.

@Max here are my prerecorded and Home Made tapes.

@static that’s incredible that setup. Is your machine 3/34 and faster? Are your prerecorded tapes 3/34 and home mades a different speed?

I particularly enjoy that the machine has it's own overhead mini spotlight, as tho it were a work of art.

Which it is!

@Max the machine does 3.75 and 7.5ips. The factory tapes some are 3.75 and others are 7.5. The homemade recordings are all 7.5

@static ok I see. I think I’ll be looking at 7” 7.5 reels. I have a question: why does faster playback equal higher quality?

Faster speed = less hiss and less wow and flutter.

@static it probably works in the same way as VHS tape LP and SP. more tape passing the head in 1 second means you have double the information so you use twice as much tape but get twice as much fidelity. I’ll have to read about reel bias a bit more, I can’t get my head around why you get less hiss at higher speeds. You’d think it would be constant. Maybe it is constant you just don’t hear it!

Also, where do you buy prerecorded reels? Discogs has a few and eBay but there must be specialists. I saw some jazz websites but they want €500 for an hour which is higher than the knockers in amsterdam

Ebay mostly. Yeah the newly released stuff is crazy expensive, and usually 15ips 2 track, which my r2r can’t play anyway.

I went and done it. Revox a77 mk3. On its way. Fully serviced, with accessories and a 10” reel of new tape.

http://www.reeltoreel.de/worldwide/A77-MK3.htm

Now I just need a place to hide it...

Good stuff @Max! :)

So I’ve done some homework. 764m/ 2500ft is about 66 minutes at 7.5ips and you can get that size reel of RTM for about £30 give or take a few £. Obviously if you run at 3/34 you get a lot longer record time but less resolution and really the whole idea is to have a luxury listen. Which brings up the next question... I don’t have access to a huge multi track mixing desk so I’ll be at home. The advantage of Reel is that vinyl has a good amount of EQ required to balance the limitations of vinyl namely 1) grooves are higher quality at the start of each side and 2) inner grooves are moving so fast that bass is intentionally removed. This is true for all vinyl records. So, the only solution is to use either WAV or FLAC to avoid certain mastering EQ and get close to the masters which are nearly always on reel pre digital and bounced down in the final vinyl mix.

I’m definately not paying £20pm for Tidal hi def. and I’d rather not pay £15 from hd tracks. Where can I get cheap FLAC or Wav music? Bandcamp has a ton of course and my first reel might be the Relations LP on Spun, from Wav. But interested to hear where to find flacs. I’m totally out of the loop.

Oh lawd he comin