When you buy a reel does the tape come ready to be played or recorded on? Or do you have to transfer it to another reel in order to string the machine up properly? ie. brown face out
Well, this is why they call it Reel to ....Reel. The tape flows off of the supply reel that you just purchased or, are about to purchase, goes over and under a series of guides and heads and then is neatly collected by the Take Up Reel , just like you may have seen in all those pictures and Hollywood movies.
The dark brown side is usually the oxide side and faced toward the heads and the opposite, lighter side is the outside and should never face the heads.
what do these numbers mean? ie 226, 456, 476, 499
Those are either the power-ball numbers from last Wednesday's draw or, they are representing the different tape formulation products from Quantigy.
456 is the most popular one and most machines are set up to work with this formulation from the factory or when they are calibrated by a qualified technician to work on your machine.
what were all the standard track counts per width of tape?
The standard NAB track widths, which were established shortly after world war II were 1/4 inch tape used the entire width of the tape for one mono channel of sound with the tape moving at 15 ips, which stands for Inches Per Second. NAB stands for National Association of Broadcasters. Latter on, when stereo came in, in the late 50's they divided the track width in half and allowed for every track to occupy 1/8 of an inch.
NAB standards after that point don't apply and then different standards were adapted by different governing, technical bodies around the world which allowed for tighter spacing and more tracks to be used in the same amount of tape width so long as the tape was electrically treated differently by the tape recorder to record a softer signal onto each section so that it would not spill over onto its neighboring track an overload from distortion.
These looser standards were largely adapted for consumer equipment where you would have 4 channels of sound on a 1/4 inch tape with a running speed of 7.5 ips or 3, 3/4 ips.
Many of the popular TASCAM and Otari reel to reel machines used this standard to allow you to fit 4 tracks on 1/4 inch tape, 8 tracks on half inch tape and 16 tracks on one inch tape with the speed running at the NAB spec of 15 ips but with the IEC spec of track width and consumer bias calibration. This lower quality standard gives you better tape economy but at a performance price of higher cross talk and less headroom before gross distortion on the tape.
Cheers!
