Old reel to reel tapes on a A77 Revox

[Ze Eduardo]

Hi everybody,

I'm a musician and teacher from Portugal. I recently bought a Revox A77 (1972) in perfect condition with the aim of rescuing my old reel tapes which I collected over the 70s and 80s with my early live performances and some studio master tapes of public released works.
After sending my new Revox to a friend of mine, an accomplished retired electronics engineer, he made all the required maintenance to the veteran machine. Now I'm using this beauty working smoothly as new and sound as warm as 40 years ago...

I've started to play my stereo 7 1/2 studio tapes into my computer recording software easily and painless. Everything worked perfectly. Now I can hear again and have a digital back up of those old tapes which I preserved for 3 decades!
Everything sounds beautiful till now...but...

The problem arised when I tryed to play the 7 1/2 live concert tapes which are recorded both sides (side a and b, probably stereo).
The Revox insists in reading both sides (4 tracks?) turning the tapes useless. I've tryed channel 1 alone, channel 2 alone, both, reverse tape, etc, nothing seems to work...What can I do?
This may sound silly but I'm a complete newbie in this subject so I any help will be very welcome!
Thanks in advance!

cheers

Ze Eduardo

 

[lonewhitefly]

Hi everybody,

I'm a musician and teacher from Portugal. I recently bought a Revox A77 (1972) in perfect condition with the aim of rescuing my old reel tapes which I collected over the 70s and 80s with my early live performances and some studio master tapes of public released works.
After sending my new Revox to a friend of mine, an accomplished retired electronics engineer, he made all the required maintenance to the veteran machine. Now I'm using this beauty working smoothly as new and sound as warm as 40 years ago...

I've started to play my stereo 7 1/2 studio tapes into my computer recording software easily and painless. Everything worked perfectly. Now I can hear again and have a digital back up of those old tapes which I preserved for 3 decades!
Everything sounds beautiful till now...but...

The problem arised when I tryed to play the 7 1/2 live concert tapes which are recorded both sides (side a and b, probably stereo).
The Revox insists in reading both sides (4 tracks?) turning the tapes useless. I've tryed channel 1 alone, channel 2 alone, both, reverse tape, etc, nothing seems to work...What can I do?
This may sound silly but I'm a complete newbie in this subject so I any help will be very welcome!
Thanks in advance!

cheers

Ze Eduardo

Sounds like you have a 2-track (half-track) machine, and the tapes were recorded on a 4-track (1/4-track) machine. If this is the case, there is no way to play back the tapes on this machine, unless you put in a 4-track headstack (or it has one? not sure if they made them like that). You will need a 4-track, 2-channel deck. The good news is these are actually more common. Many of the Revox A77 models were setup like this. Or you could find some 4-track heads for the Revox and have your friend install them for these tapes. Hope that helps!

 

[jpmorris]

Yes, that's the thing. To amplify what Lonewhitefly said, Stereo tapes come in two main formats. Professional ones use the entire width of the tape for maximum quality - this is known as 'half track' format (each channel takes half the tape). Consumer machines usually use half the tape width for each side, so you can turn it over, which is called 'quarter track' format (each channel takes a quarter of the tape).

Revox machines were marketed as high quality recorders so they tended to use the half-track format. Hence it plays back the studio tapes, but will fail miserably when asked to play a quarter-track tape. There are quarter-track versions of the A77 and B77 out there.
While it is probably possible to get a quarter-track headblock for your existing machine, it will need to be dismantled in order to fit it and the machine will then have to be recalibrated - at which point it will no longer play the studio tapes properly.

It would probably be better to find a second machine if you need to play both formats.
A quarter-track Revox would be good but they're not as common. You might consider the TASCAM 22-4 or 34, which are actually 4-track home studio machines, but they use the same track format (you would just need to make sure you enabled the correct pair of channels!).
The drawbacks are that the 22 series can only handle up to 7" spools, I don't know if that's a problem. Also they only run at 7.5 and 15ips, so if any tapes are 3.75, they'd play back twice as fast.

Alternatively, you might look at a consumer machine like the Akai GX series. Again, some of these only go up to 7" spools, and they will probably need to be recapped if quality is critical since they are going to be pretty old by now.

 

[Ze Eduardo]

Hello,

Thanks a lot lonewhitefly & jpmorris. I was expecting something like that. I will try to get those tapes played by a quarter track machine!

cheers

ZeEd