Your nostalgic gear...

the Alesis is a quadraverb GT
Together with the Marshall 90001 and 8008 those i bought when i was a teenager.

The rest was bought in the last 2-3 years
Especially love the Rocktron, s400 and Alex.
But they all are inspiring to play.
 
I also have the Leslie Preamp which lets me use it with line level stuff. Absolutely cool.
A Preamp.webp
 
I'm the complete opposite. I grew up with tape. Heck, my dad recorded me when I was 2 or 3 yrs old. I bought cassettes and open reel tapes by the case when I was young. I used it because it was the best we had, but I never had the feeling that what went in was what came out. Maybe I was super sensitive to high frequency noise, but tape hiss always drove me nuts. Adding a DBX made a nice difference but it wasn't perfect. I get tickled when I read comments that what comes off the tape sounds better than the original signal. Seriously? It's like saying the leftover steak you put in the fridge and reheated in the microwave tastes better than it did fresh the night before.

When I got my first digital recorder, I felt like it was finally possible to get back 100% of what was recorded. Maybe it was only 95%, but it was a quantum leap forward. Yeah, you can screw it up and make it sound bad, but stay within the borders and you get back an intact recording. That was almost 20 yrs ago, and while I still have a tape deck, it's last use was to transfer those tapes my dad made 70 yrs ago to digital. My cases of tapes were trashed under 18" of water. It killed me to lose them, because a some were totally irreplaceable. I have one master tape that was on a higher shelf. Someday, maybe I'll get my hands on a 10" machine and see what's on it. I'm certain I'll have to replace all the splices from the leader tape.

It's funny that this is so prevalent in the audio world. I never read about people taking their 4K video tracks and passing them through a VHS or 8mm tape deck to "improve" them. Presto... no more pimples or wrinkles on the faces, just a smear of flesh color with a blurry nose, mouth and eyes and a homogenized brown patch that sort of looks like hair! Now put that thing on your 75" QLED 8K flat screen and revel in the beauty!

Instead, the complaints about early digital photography were about how poor the resolution was compared to those Kodacolor and Ektachrome photos. I remember the first digital camera we got at work. Blow that 640x480 digital picture up to a 16x20 print and it looks like crap. Nowadays, I see people apologize for the "crappy" cell phone photo that has a billion possible colors with 4000x3000 resolution!

Frank,
RE: your VHS vs DAW test. How hot did you master those tracks. The highhats, kick and bass sounded quite distorted to me. I first thought, "OK, that's the VHS's issue". but then the USB track sounded somewhat the same, not quite as bad, but still distorted.
 
themindwillnotletgo said:
Johnson Amplification Millennium Stereo 150 - This was one of the first modelling amps, JA and Line-6 came out about the same time right around the turn of the century. I chose the Johnson mainly for the tube preamp section, the Digitech effects processor, and the ability to perform firmware updates via desktop computer. Line-6 survived obviously :D, as far as I know, this is obsolete. Great sounding amp, I ran it with a 2x12 extension cabinet for live, and still use its XLR direct outs today for the vast majority of my DAW guitar tracks.
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Ha! I intersected with those twice, in two very different ways.

First, I remember the first time I saw one of those, I gave it a try, and flipping through presets, found a Recto + delay lead guitar patch. I'd never played a Mesa of any sort previously, and that sound HOOKED me. It took a few years to get my first, a Rocket-44, but I never really looked back, and today have a Mark-V and a Rectifier Roadster.

Second, a buddy of mine found one for sale at a music shop not too far away from me, for dirt cheap, also had nostalgic feelings about it, so I offered to grab it for him, and he swung by my place later that week to pick it up with a six pack. We cracked a beer, plugged into the thing, started jamming... and maybe an hour later, "hey, do you smell smoke?" Damned thing caught fire. 🤣

We made a LOT of jokes about my buddy's "flaming Johnson" after that.

I used a J-Station to record for a number of years too, don't remember what ever happened to that thing. Eventually I just got better at micing amps, and the J-Station couldn't keep up.
 
I guess for nostalgic gear for me... Aside from simply my main Strat, a '97 I bought brand new in '98, I have a Levy's leather strap, smooth (when new, lol) upper and sueded underside, and the nylon bushing cotton strap double loop adjustment rather than the belt-style, that I probably bought in 2001 or so, when I bought my first seven string and found it tended to neck-dive a little so I needed something that gripped a little better, hence the sueded other side. I no longer own that guitar (a RG7620), but at some point along the way that strap made it onto my Strat. It's old, the smooth start has started to crack and flake a little exposing the raw leather underneath it, and while I've started occasionally applying leather conditioner in the last few years for the first ~20 years of its life the only thing it was conditioned with was beer or whiskey.

Levy's makes a strap very close to that one today and I have it on a bunch of other guitars, and it objectively might make sense to replace it with something less beat up... but it just feels like part of the guitar now and I would miss it, I think, if I took it off.
 
Old Music Guy said:
Are you referring to 10" reels? Is it 1/2" or 1/4" tape?
My Revox is 10" reels, 1/2" tape. I would be happy to help if I can.
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It's a 10" metal reel of 1/4" tape. It's got paper leader between the songs. I think it was the master from the record that was pressed of my sister's high school chorus recording, and probably only one side. I can't remember if it was 1/4 or 1/2 track tho. It's has to be from the late 70s.

I think I know a place that I could take it to, but it's not really that important any more, except for "nostalgic" purposes.
 
I could transfer the 10" reel on to a few 7" reels if you like.
If I can help, let me know.
 
The drums had a sample that was on the edge indeed. Would have done it differently now.

Cassettes i would not use
But the larger tape formats are very nice. They have a certain natural compression it's just glues it together. But those are very expensive.

I grew up using 4 track tape decks at home. But my first company was a recording studio where we worked with tape ofcourse. It sounded great but needed daily calibration.

Just before we would switch to adat it stopped.
 
At that moment in time. Lo-fi meant losing your client. It had to be perfect and tape was far from that. We wanted adat because it was a lot better

Imagine how time changes our goals and what we see as nice.
 
1996 was the turning point for me, ADATs and DAT changed everything. Still not perfect, but live sound that didn't hiss was the real thing - not actual record quality in many cases. The reel to reels were retired with a snap of the fingers.
 
TalismanRich said:
You've never seen a Leslie in person?!?! You've missed one of the great sounds in rock music.
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no doubt about that. I don't know if REO Speedwagon used one, but that was probably about as close as I got - it was my first concert, I think it was 1982, I was 12, lol. By the time I started playing, it was AC/DC and Van Halen - I remember keyboards kind of having a negative connotation in the stupid little group of 15yr old heshers I jammed around with :ROFLMAO:
 
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