TASCAM Wallpaper

[The Ghost of FM]

Glad you're happy with the results and considering the lighting conditions you had to work with there, your camera did a good job of capturing a nice sharp image that I was able to "polish up" in Photoshop without too much grief!



Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Continuing on with my mini-tribute to Altec, I present the Altec 436C compressor which Abbey Road studios in London took and modified to create the infamous 124 model that the Beatles used to record a multitude of hits through!



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Finishing up on the Altec 436C story started above, here's what EMI and Abbey Road Studios transformed it into....



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Cheers!

 

[j.harv]

Thats Awesome! I love all things Beatles/Abbey rd studios. Just been flipping through my 'Recording the Beatles' book recently. It's about all the studio gear/techniques they used. An amazing book!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Thanks, J!

All of that era is magical to me too because I grew up with most of it...one of the few benefits of being an old geezer!



Speaking of older stuff, here's an old Weston 432 Kilowatt meter from the late 40's. Not really a recording device but just a cool piece of forgotten technology.



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

lonewhitefly's recent acquisition of that Scully 4 track and Sono-mix mixer inspired me to do a bit of searching for other vintage mixers that were even older then the one he found and allowed me to stumble upon this next one which is an old, all tube, 4 channel microphone mixer from the late 40's, early 50's and looks to be something custom built. The wood case came from something altogether different, an old table top short wave radio and I put the two items together to come up with something a bit more elegant then what RCA had intended for this little beastie.



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Here's another nice example of RCA's handwork from the art deco era...



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Another piece of RCA gear from the WWII era, the 5 rack space high BW-66F modulation monitor. Not really part of the recording chain but more-so for the AM broadcast industry of the day to monitor their transmission signals and ensure they were going out at the right strength and quality. This image is essentially a Frankenstein construction of several different images mainly due to the fact that no quality images of this unit existed prior to this one here and now.



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Moving back toward more familiar ground, here's a nice example of Teac's handiwork from 1968, the all tube AR-50 recording preamp. This unit was designed to mate with the A-5000 open reel deck and was their last all tube offering before they came out with the solid state AR-40 series units which mated up with the A-4010 transport. For those with a sharp eye for detail, you might notice that this unit is appreciable taller to accommodate the tube construction and larger transformers that made it run. Classy looking unit for sure, in my opinion!



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Cheers!

 

[RFR]

Damn, Ghost.

You just keep on coming up with this cool ass stuff! And you always make it look stellar!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Thanks, Ro!

I'm always on the hunt for cool looking gear and am often rewarded for my efforts!

Just for fun, here's a pic of the teac A-5000 with a super model!



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Just to do the A-5000 a bit more justice with a full wallpaper of the amp and transport together....Sorry, no super model in this one!



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Unless you were a film projectionist in the 1950's, it's likely you've never seen this unit before, an Altec S-15 auditorium amplifier unit designed to work with optical film soundtracks in movie theaters. This was a fairly massive all tube unit that was designed to be a floor standing amp with a sloped top control panel which is what's featured in this image.


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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Always on the hunt for interesting and rare TASCAM items, here's a wallpaper for all the M-35 mixer fans out there, the M-35EX, 12 channel expansion sidecar mixer. The original image was kind of low-res, so apologies in advance for the less then stellar image quality on this one. Tried my best to clean it up a bit...



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Cheers!

 

[RFR]

Hey! aren't you supposed to be on vacation???
:

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Hey! aren't you supposed to be on vacation???
:

The vaykay was from Prime Time.

Self imposed.



Cheers!

 

[RFR]

Ahhhh. Smart man you are.

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Thanks to the miracles of digital technology, my main computer died on me about a week ago and so haven't been able to do much graphic work but finally got a new machine and have finally configured it to where I'm comfortable with this new one, an HP DC7800 small form factor business class PC. It's an older "off lease deal" and so was cheap and cheerful. But enough about all this digital crap! Time for more analog goodness from days gone by!

So, as I was mentioning HP a moment ago, I thought I'd dive back to their earlier days when they made analog gear! No, the didn't make sound recording gear but they did make some of the finest analog test gear, and as I covered oscilloscopes a while back, thought I'd move on down the tech bench and post up a wallpaper of an HP distortion analyzer from the 70's, the model 334A.



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

I covered some Orban pieces a while back and now have another one to present here, the 622B 2 channel 4 band parametric eq which was one of their earlier models that later got updated with some different knobs and a few subtle feature changes. Personally, I think this one's the more handsome of the series...



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Cheers!

 

[The Ghost of FM]

I covered a Telefunken compressor unit a couple of pages back which was a custom unit as these modules were actually designed to go into a mini vertical rack, sort of like a dbx 900 series frame. Anyway, I found another custom unit from Telefunken, a two channel pre-amp unit in a more manageable 2 rack space custom frame and tweaked it a bit in Photoshop to dress up some of the details on it such as the screws, badge and grab-handles...seeing as its all non standard fare to begin with kind of gave me free license to make it my own, so to speak.



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Cheers!