I made an account on here just so I could reply to this.
In 2014 I decided to buy my first reel to reel deck for the home. I went through Akai, two Panasonics, and finally landed on Teac 7030GSL to my liking. In 2017 I bought an MCI JH110 I use for 10.5" reels.
First I would just like to say this. The magic of reel to reel as a legitimate format that outpaces the CD is not really for playback but for making recordings. Obviously reel to reel is not a dead format as there are studios that still use tape to this day. I’m talking 2" multi-track master tape. Think Otari, MCI, Studer, Tascam, Ampex. Those are in a different league but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here. The wider tracks on large tape have way more room to saturate than cassette. The workflow of reel to reel for me is still my preference.
As far as the second category of reel to reel format, is the consumer decks that were sold for playing back prerecorded reel. Made by Japanese companies such as Sony, Akai, Teac, Panasonic. They usually are limited to 3 3/4 and 7 1/2 playback. These are inferior to CD’s. The prerecorded tapes they sold on the market are many generations separated from the source and probably played many times and worn. Unless you’re seeking out 15 IPS audiophile music releases that are brand new then in that case it’s probably going to sound incredible to your ears. However 7 1/2 can still sound very good and some decks have a frequency response that outpaces CD’s.
We should also note that is a myth that reel to reel heads wear. Yes the metal heads used on professional decks wear but then they are still manufacturing new heads for pro decks. The heads used in consumer decks are the same heads used in cassette decks like Nak. Ferrite heads last forever and don’t need to be relapped, but they crumble or crack if abused which is actually a little more common than people realize. I brought my Teac heads to John @ JRF Magnetics and he found they were cracked when he observed them. What does wear are the tapes themselves every time you play them, so more times than not any used tape you buy on the market has lost it’s higher frequencies and doesn’t sound too good. This is because as a tape sheds overtime it changes the azimuth. Cassettes last much longer since they are running at slower speeds. Funny enough one of the advantages of VHS tape for example is that it does not come in direct contact with the heads, so VHS heads and VHS tape does not wear and could have been an incredible music format if it was realized.
RTR as a format is not going anywhere, but it depends on the circumstance and it depends on what you are using it for. There are perceived qualities of analog that can’t be replicated with plugins. Analog tape including cassettes are actually the only format and I exclude vinyl that is capable of reproducing the full waveform of the higher frequencies. Something that 44.1 CD’s are incapable of doing. This is the whole reason why SACD’s were introduced. I would not recommend investing in a setup today for musical enjoyment. Do it as a serious hobby because the parts and support are non existent. For analog musical enjoyment investing in an audiophile cassette deck will get you superior results. Only reason I have them and restore them is I run an archival business for unreleased tape, as well as use them in the studio to make recordings. |
@CleedsWhat’s your point? First you say one thing, then another. Either way, there’s no question that tape heads are subject to wear. It’s not a "myth." That’s actually impossible. Cassette and reel are two different formats, two different tape widths. So, many of the consumer reel to reel decks sold on the market like cassette decks were manufactured with heads that never wear down. For that reason ferrite heads for example cannot be relapped. They never develop a flat spot. Since the ferrite is encased in glass unlike metal heads, they can be polished but not reshaped. Also to clarify, head wear and head failure are not the same. Ferrite can go bad. There are several ways tape can lose HF and wear is only one of them. Exposure to a magnetized tape path is another - that’s the function of a demagnetizer. But I’d sure like to know why you think tape wear changes azimuth. Mostly from wear on the spools. Tape played the first time will not have the same azimuth as the tape played the 200th time. A VHS tape deck wraps the tape around a rotary spinning tape head, which gives it a high "write speed" relative to the speed of tape travel. There is definitely contact between tape and head and wear is the result. VHS rewinders solved a problem that did not exist. Because of the nature of moving heads, VHS tape floats close to the heads but do not need to make direct contact unlike linear tracks. Early VCRs would load and wrap the videotape virtually completely around the video head (leftover technology from the U-MATIC format) leading to premature wear. Under normal circumstances VHS tape will never "wear out" or "fade". That is a common myth spread around from the ads to "save your tapes". |
Great to hear from you Andrew. I agree. Cassettes unfortunately have serious quality control and this is related to azimuth as well. I love rtr decks because of how easy they are to calibrate. Even the best tape decks (the Nak ZX-9, CR-7, the Tandberg 3014, the Revox B215), all aligned and calibrated as per factory spec, will be only average or mediocre when playing back a set of pre-recorded cassettes obtained from different publishers. Each of these decks will accidentally have their playback azimuth alignment very closely aligned with some of your cassettes, but will have poor alignment with other cassettes, and there will be nothing you can do about it. The manufacturers of pre-recorded cassettes, especially in India, on the whole, did not follow close tolerances when manufacturing their cassettes. They even followed mass manufacture processes which make such close tolerances impossible to obtain consistently. Therefore, even the world’s best decks are going to be only average when retrieving the last bit of HF information from a bunch of pre-recorded cassettes. The only exception is a correctly working Dragon with a correctly aligned NAAC sub-system. |
A common myth is that azimuth is related to head alignment and that is not really the case. Only true when recording. It’s tape and no one tape has the same alignment and it will change overtime. There is no such thing as correct azimuth to clarify that point. Cassettes for this reason are my least favorite format. Reel to reel decks @ 7 1/2 and vinyl will blow even the best cassette decks out of the water for this reason imo.
A good trick to know if you are getting the best out of your tape is to listen to the mono bass or leads vocals in stereo, or you can even force to mono. Make a headphone cable with the ground removed, and listen when the bass and lead vocals fade out completely. When you null that is when you azimuth is aligned with the tape. Playing a 1kHz tone should sound like baking frying. An oscilloscope won’t tell you this.
Interesting part about VHS is that you had multiple azimuths on the same drum that read different parts of the tape. For that reason VHS tape had stricter quality control and surprisingly superior sound to all formats @ 1800 rpm. It’s too bad that format was never realized for audio but that is another rabbit hole topic all together. |
Seriously?? Head azimuth **is** part of head alignment! Along with head height (on reel to reels). On a cassette deck azimuth is the only adjustment you get when aligning the heads. So on cassettes, azimuth and head alignment are exactly the same thing. The reason I bring up cassette is that it’s a lot more annoying to make adjustments than on reel to reel, mostly you can’t trust cassettes to give you reliable results because the azimuth is always changing. Even if you adjust to a standard there will never be a correct azimuth when it comes to cassettes even on the best three heads decks. For that reason performance will always be lackluster unless you are making your own recordings. A good example are tapes recorded on Nak decks notoriously sound bad on non-Nak decks. On the other hand you would like to believe that reel to reel will give you more accurate results, but that too is not always the case. http://www.tapeheads.net/showthread.php?t=70517
The best way I can describe it is this. The azimuth I refer to is what is printed on the tape in response to the record head. No one machine will have the same azimuth and no one tape will have the same azimuth. I bring this up to point out the performance of reel to reel will give you significantly better results than any cassette deck. Not because of the speed. Using the example of speed, 1⅞ ips can sound just as good at 15 ips except one will have more tape hiss. The difference is that reel to reel will always have greater frequency response because of the nature of its azimuth. The way the playback head is being used allows you to pull more information out of it. Anyhow that has given me the best results so far listening back and fourth. That is how I squeeze the most information out of every tape that comes into my possession. I do not calibrate the machines I use in my lineup. Personal preference. |
@clearthink by the way VHS tape wears like crazy there is a lot of friction in there!
VHS makes a good comparison showcasing the differences between a linear format and helical. What makes helical scan unique is the heads are recessed VERY SLIGHTLY into the head drum. You’ll notice when observing one that you can’t even see the head clearly at first glance when looking at a head drum. All you see at first is shadow of the recessed cavity. Since the head is an electromagnetic device no contact is needed for pickup. Now that VHS is offload from the drum when playback is paused it lasts much longer than other tape formats. There is virtually no tape shedding. We’re talking about audio here, but color and picture information cannot fade overtime from video tape either which is engrained in the signal. It’s not like film. That is one of the downsides to reel to reel is that they wear out much faster at higher speeds. Cassettes last much longer in that regard. There were audio machines for both Beta and VHS back in the 1980s. HiFi is a very underrated format for audio. Dynamic range and frequency response that matches CDs, and virtually zero tape hiss at speeds equivalent of 300 IPS with the moving heads (not a typo). It would have been real interesting to see helical technology being used in recording studios. A 16 track VHS deck would have been awesome to see. I would definitely prefer it to reel to reel. DAT format is not the same of course because that is a digital format. HiFi uses frequency modulation. They called it "poor man’s rtr". Funny enough I’ve considered making backup archives of my reel to reels to VHS. |
This statement is false. I’ve seen them worn first-hand. I should clarify this point. Ferrite heads can never really be relapped but they do fail. When I purchased my Teac 7030GSL with ferrite heads I brought them to John @ JRF Magnetics hoping to get them relapped. He informed me that he could not relap them because they were ferrite heads. We had to fit new metal heads on the Teac he found in his stock room that made a good fit. Often times when they fail overtime they become brittle and develop cracks until they shatter, but they don’t develop a flat spot because you can’t relap the glass that is encasing the ferrite without risking damage to the fragile glass. There are also two different kind of ferrite heads. I’m talking about the ones on consumer decks made by Akai and Teac. No one manufactures new ferrite heads anymore for this reason. Metal heads on the other hand as you know do wear down and develop flat spots very quickly but can be relapped very easily. They are also less noisy so it’s a trade off if you want longer lasting heads. |
Ferrite heads aren’t relapped because its not worth it. Relapping a head only works out if you have a more expensive part and nearly all ferrite cassette heads are inexpensive.
For that reason I have an admitted bias against ferrite heads, because their tendency to shatter which happens to no other head type. Once that happens they are junk. Plus an extra 10dB of noise. I stick with metal heads for my recordings and archiving machines. So while it is true ferrite heads did last significantly longer when they were used, once they get enough usage the glass will crack and more times then not you are forced to replace the head. This is the kind of wear I’ve seen on many decks that used ferrite over the years. Doesn’t happen as much with cassettes because of the lower speed. Trust me on this? They weren’t that awesome. The typical ’studio’ machines had the transport built into the mixer. They were considered semi-pro; the recording industry didn’t take VHS and Beta all that seriously even though they were a compact multichannel format. Their main downfall is they simply weren’t reliable for day in and day out 24/7 service, and when Something Bad happened the tape was often locked inside the transport; requiring a complete disassembly just to rescue a tape that might never play again. Thank goodness those days are past!!
You’re right it is a love hate relationship. The proof is in the pudding on the reliability of VHS. Good luck getting service on your VCR today. Good luck even attempting any repairs yourself. It is true they never manufactured a deck that was both high quality and reliable. Too bad they couldn’t make them as hardy as good old cassettes. Funny enough I just purchased a Sony SVO 5800 with an old Betacam 2800 I’m going to be using for this kind of project. I’m going to attempt syncing the output of the Sony with the Betacam as a TBC. I’m posting in other VHS forums and this is going off topic, but it’s become a huge obsession of mine to find out how far I can take the format. I even purchased an ozone generator I use to clean my tapes. :) |
I feel like I discussed cassettes but not reel to reel. So I want to post that one of the main benefits of reel to reel is that it plays at higher speeds. At higher speeds it’s much harder to distort. So with a reel to reel deck you only need 20dB of dynamic range. Above -20VU cassettes fall on their face. Cassettes got away with less distortion with noise shaping technologies like Dolby and DBX, and the only reason why it required more headroom. Digital recordings of course are most easy to distort which is why you need 144dB of headroom. It’s pretty amazing what reel to reel is capable of and pretty understandable why it was the standard for so long. Cassettes can still sound incredible. It really is apples and oranges. You can't compare reel to reel to any other format. |
I have to second that. I would have preferred a cassette or reel to reel comeback instead of vinyl, but we might get lucky as I heard those are making a comeback as well. Better buy them while you still can. Lol! Vinyl is one of the most difficult and expensive consumer formats to get good results out of. You can spend stupid amounts of money on cartridges, needles, arms, pres, and still get average results.
I agree that tape has a different sound than digital, but most of the difference between the two formats comes through when recording and not as much when playing back. A digital recording of a tape recording will very much sound like tape and you won’t notice the difference, but a digital recording transferred to tape will add some colorization but will still have the characteristics of a digital recording. It’s like trying to colorize a black and white photo. The "magic" of analog is the way that tape saturates and distorts in the recording studio compared with digital which can’t handle any amount distortion.
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This will be true regardless of the source of the recording. This 3rd harmonic makes tape good for taming the highs in digital systems, which like it or not have distortion called ’aliasing’ (since the digital world does not like to admit to distortion). That is a good point. I’m more referencing clipping distortion. Once a digital file has distorted or clipped, analog tape cannot fix a distorted digital recording. A lot of the harshness you hear from a digital recording and digital plugins is from clipping which may be very faint. Recording a digital recording on tape which suffers from the "loudness wars" for example won’t tame or fix the distortion in that instance. Now I want to bring up azimuth because I feel I only vaguely touched on it. Yes azimuth on tape can change overtime as it ages. As a reel to reel or cassette tape ages its azimuth changes from beginning to the end of the recording overtime, most likely due to loss of lubricant in the tape and slip sheets, and shell friction/variations each time it is played. This can happen and it can become noticeable. 1/60 degree azimuth error is enough to deaden the treble response of reel to reel or cassette. If you are adjusting azimuth with a test tape to enjoy prerecorded music you are doing it wrong. When you own a Dragon with NAAC correction, you can hear it making corrections multiple times on worn out old tapes that were played many times. Many make judgments on the format using worn out tape, worn out heads, machines that are improperly calibrated, and they wonder why their reel to reel doesn’t sound like a Studer at Abbey Road Studios. This is what Nakamichi actually said in a brochure. naks.com/products/nakamichi_dragon.html?fbclid=IwAR1FwROEUoCJBteINlT FZe8S5wMKxhLrdeQg8l42t2J_IoOaPCr_lC_x_nk"Proper azimuth alignment is one of the most important factors in achieving the best possible tape reproduction quality. Ideally, playback head azimuth should be adjustable so that even tapes recorded on other decks will be reproduced with the recorded frequency response and sound quality fully intact. Commercially available music tape, tapes borrowed from a friend, tapes in which the shell has warped slightly (a common occurrence) all actually require some degree of playback head azimuth alignment to provide the best possible reproduction quality. Further, inaccuracies in cassette shell symmetry result in completely different azimuth alignment requirements in forward and reverse on auto reverse decks, often causing a significant variation in sound quality with machines that don’t have azimuth adjustment." |
Now above is for playback, but azimuth adjustment was also useful and always changing when recording as well. If the tape’s path and track(s) is/are not precisely perpendicular to the recording head (or at its best angle to it) as we know, you will have reduced fidelity in the recording process. Many cassettes had ’variable’ QC when it comes to cassette shells and the mounting of tape within them (reel to reel shells wear as well). As a result, being able to vary the recording head azimuth for the tape in your deck when ready to record was a good thing. For that reason rec az adjustment was more popular and useful than variable play. Also with headwear it might be necessary to readjust the azimuth after some time. |
