Which tape for 600 series ampex decks?

Scotch 111 would have been the standard at the time, though some of these are getting pretty brittle (prone to breaking), and most suffer from at least a little 'vinegar syndrome' ...

102 or 111AM are the less common poly versions, and I believe these are generally good tapes in my experience.

Ampex 631, 632, 641 would be common tapes that would also probably work well that are not problematic.

Note these are old-style low-output tapes with no backcoating ... not sure if you can set those decks up for high-output tape or not.
 
Thanks
Any modern tape might work?
Couldn't find a spec, but I'm assuming one mil?
I know a lot of folks like the sound of vintage tape, but I'm not crazy about having to hunt down iffy old stuff.
 
Last edited:
I'm really not sure if 1.0 or 1.5 is ideal for that deck ... you can probably adjust it for either. I think when it first came out, 1.5 would have been more common.

Modern tape will probably work, just maybe not ideally. but they don't make low-output types anymore, and I'm not sure that deck can be properly biased and set up for high output.

where did you score this thing? does it work alright? I've been thinking about going to that electronics swap meet in San Jose, have you ever been to one of those?
 
I had good luck with Ampex/Quantegy 632 tape when I had an Ampex 602 deck (yeah I regret selling it).
 
I was going to suggest the Quantegy 63x/64x tapes. You can probably run anything you want on it and see how it goes, but the 1mil stuff might work better. LPR35? What are you thinking you'd *like* to use on it?
 
Hey sweets,
I'd "like" to use lpr35 because that's what I use on my 388.
But I'll look into some of the other stuff you guys have suggested.
 
lonewhitefly said:
that's a cool website you've got there ... is freelove fenner your band? sounds very good !
Click to expand...
Hey, thanks for the kind words! Yep that's my band.

RE using 1mil tape. I did try 3M scotch 177 on my 602 and it seemed to work OK. I'm not sure if my machine was typical, but it had rather feeble amount of takeup tension. I would have figured 1mil tape would help with that but it didn't. And I do wonder if 1mil would be more prone to stretching if you stopped the tape suddenly (my deck could be a bit rough on tape--again, not sure if that's typical). I tried doing a search on the Ampex list archives for advice on this but it doesn't seem to be working for me today.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top