Stax Records

[famous beagle]

Just got back from Memphis where I toured the Stax Museum. My 10 month-old daughter and I were the only two white people there.

The rest of the tour was great, but the real reason I went did not disappoint: the control room and studio. I didn't have a camera on me (my wife had it with her), but you can see some decent shots here on the site:

Gallery Tour » Stax Museum

There's a Scully 1-inch 8-track, a Scully 1/4" half track, and a Teac 1/4" half track as well.

I didn't see model numbers on either Scully, but the track modules said "280" on them.

I couldn't find a model or brand name on the mixing board at all, and I didn't recognize it, but it certainly looked cool. I see from the site it's an Auditronics 20 input/8 buss.


In the live room, they had Steve Cropper's Tele and Super Reverb, Donald Dunn's Fender P-Bass, Booker T's M3, and Al Jackson's Rogers kit. The room was quite a nice size with probably 20 foot ceilings at least and a good bit of acoustic treatment in the form of baffles, diffusers, etc.


Anyway, it was a great time and well worth the $12. The downside is that now it's really made me want to add a half track R2R to my 8-track one.

 

[Beck]

Just got back from Memphis where I toured the Stax Museum...


There's a Scully 1-inch 8-track, a Scully 1/4" half track, and a Teac 1/4" half track as well.

I didn't see model numbers on either Scully, but the track modules said "280" on them.

Awesome! Cool looking place. Yep, those are Scully 280 decks. The 1-inch 8-track 280 is the Model Scholz converted to 1-inch 12-track for the 1976 Boston debut album.

The downside is that now it's really made me want to add a half track R2R to my 8-track one.

No, that's all upside! Gotta have a nice R2R analog mixdown deck. That's half the battle! Just for future reference, something like the Tascam 32 easily matches or beats the old Scully machines, sonically speaking.