TASCAM Wallpaper

That Ibanez unit is so cool! :guitar:

I have the Ibanez UE400 which has a compressor, distortion, phaser and chorus. I understood that these were like the old school equivalent of a guitar multi-fx pedal and I initially bought it and racked it above my bass amp using it for compression and chorus effect on my bass (The Cure anyone?) but now lives in my studio rack as all the effects sound great for what they are - 9 times out of 10 I use the chorus on the ibanez unit over my Roland DEP-5 (of course one is analog chorus whilst the other digital). My unit actually didn't come with the pedal but the previous owner installed little switches for each effect channel which is very handy for what I use it for now days anyway.

Such a great unit that doesn't come up often around my part of the world, but next one to pop up UE400 or UE405, I will be buying.
 
I got intrigued a bit to find some other Ibanez rack gear and found what I believe to be their first 2U rack space analog delay and flanger, model AD-220 from somewhere around 1977. This was a very beefy piece of gear with much thicker gauge steel all around and looks to be extremely road-worthy! Anyway, the available images on line of this beast were pretty poor but managed to find a couple of files that I mangled together to make the following wallpaper of it. The knobs are bit blurry though as I couldn't find a clean sample to work from.



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Cheers! :)
 
Just a bit of a redo on the previous shot. Re-did the knobs and lettering via painting them into existence for the most part. You'd probably need to do a slide show of the two to see the subtle changes made.



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Also, for anyone who's interested, here's the pic I was working from for this one.



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Cheers! :)
 
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Next up?

The Vocoder! Yes, that silly effect that Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons Project, Kraftwerk and many other artists used back in the 70's and 80's to turn their vocals into unworldly sounds! Surprisingly enough, the history of this technology goes all the way back into the 1930's when military entities were looking for a way to scramble their communications while narrowing the bandwidth required for extra long distance transmissions. Bell Laboratories take credit for the origins of this technology but their original working designs used during WWII occupied 2500 sqare feet of floor space for each of the separately placed broadcasting and listening posts around the world. But it wasn't until the late 60's when Moog came up with the first solid state unit. Shortly thereafter, many manufacturers came onto this scene and also offered up their own versions of this technology.

For now, I'll offer up Electro-Harmonix's kick at this can for a couple of reasons.

1 - As they were known as a stomp box company, this rack mount unit of theirs, from 1979 represents their first venture into "studio" 3U rack gear
2 - After checking out several other units of the day, this is the coolest looking one of the bunch! I'm sure many of the others were in fact better units but weren't as cute. :D


Anyway, here's the EH Vocoder...



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Cheers! :)
 
I covered a couple of "vintage" Sonic Maximizer units from BBE a while back and found a newer one called the 882 that I thought looked pretty funky so here's a wallpaper of that to add to the collection...



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Cheers! :)
 
Had this next one sitting on my hard drive for the past year or so in a partial state of reconstruction and decided today was a good day to put the finishing touches on it. I actually have several hundred shots of varies gear in varying stages of processing as sometimes I just get tired in the middle of one and put it away until later and then invariably forget about it until I rediscover it again when I go though all my folders which contain about 4000+ images of various odds and ends.

Anyway, here's the Revox MK I A 77 reel to reel. This one was just a 7.5 ips beast but later turned into a full fledged 15 ips half track in future versions which looked a lot like the PR-99 model...



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Cheers! :)
 
Ever on the hunt for oddball items, I discovered this next one from an unlikely manufacturer, Seeburg, who were mostly known for making Jukeboxes in the cold war era. This item is a basic mixer from them and looks like some kind of unit for the typical restaurant owner who might need to make some public announcements over the Jukebox to his patrons. Oddly enough, I found this while searching out vintage mic preamps from the 50's.

Anyway, here's the little beastie...



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Cheers! :)
 
A ways back, I covered an El-Caset model from Teac, the AL-700. At the time I also meant to cover the Grand daddy of the format, the Sony EL-7 but was having trouble finding a decent image of one, shot at the right angle, the right lens and decently lit. So while I had worked up a couple of renders back then, I wasn't happy enough with any of them to post them up here. Anyway, this morning I decided to hunt around the web to see if a better shot of one was out there yet and stumbled upon a good shot of one which was banged up a little but had no problems putting it through the digital body shop to hammer out the dents! :D

Anyway, here's the Sony EL-7 Elcaset with the same feature set as the teac model...



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Cheers! :)
 
Too bad the Elcaset never took off. It looks like a cool format!
:spank::eek:;)

Thanks, Dave! :)

Yeah, it sure was a cool format until they figured out how to squeeze more quality out of those puny compact cassettes and ruined the party for Sony and their long history of innovative formats that all ended up in the scrapheap of history. :D



Cheers! :)
 
Nice work on the pic! So what was the deal? This wasn't the normal cassette size we've all become accustomed to?
 
Ah, ha. Never heard of that. Much better format. Too bad. If it would have taken off, we'd have a 1/4 inch 238!
Now wouldn't that be something.
:D
 
the Elcaset ran 1/4" tape, I think at 1-7/8 ips.
:spank::eek:;)

3.75 ips, actually. 0.5 mil tape thickness.

The ferochrome formulation didn't do well as a long term storage medium though. Lots of reports of those tapes having numerous problems with shedding, drop outs, sticky shed, etc. The type I normal bias tapes on the other hand are stable.



Cheers! :)
 
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