Thank you for sharing! I got to transfer my g/f's tapes her father made during his 2nd tour of Vietnam in the late 60's, complete with artillery, aircraft and other distractions! As a bonus, one of the tapes was direct from 93 KHJ and Johnny Williams playing The Beatles, Herman's Hermits and more. Nothing sounds more appropriate than "No Milk Today" in lo-fi direct from radio with that "vintage", booming sound. Nostalgia at its finest!
Incredible video. Old recordings can be so interesting. 1-7/8 Is indeed slow, but if the machine is calibrated correctly, it can sound fairly good. Some of the old Muzak services that played in businesses were played from tapes at this speed. Cool sounds. Thanks for sharing.
I used to record off the radio as a kid myself onto cassette tapes. My dad would play them in the car on road trips. Even now as an adult I still enjoy recording onto cassette using streaming radio apps like tunein as an audio source.
My dad had one of these back in the early 70's. That machine was great. It had SOS (sound on sound) that let you sort of do multitrack work. Although it was a one shot deal. Once you laid down some sound on top of existing sound, if you made a mistake you had to start over from scratch. Great seeing that reel to reel again.
I've never tried the SOS feature but I'm definitely intrigued by it. Sounds like it can be a way to dub your own vocals over music, that'd be cool. Even though this deck is more of a "budget" model without all the bells and whistles, it does everything you need it to do and it seems to do it very well.
@@BrettDarien My parents were in a small folk group called The Hilarys. They used SOS to add vocals and things. I think all SOS does is allow recording without turning on the erase head. It worked well back then although like I say, any mistakes and you had to start over.
Thats perfect sound for that speed. Usually radio recordings, that speed was fine (for AM). For FM the differences would have been significantly cleaner at either of the higher speeds
@@janath9118 the speed in never ok that slow no matter the source but AM radio isn´t high-fidelity so you might had it right only not that good of a sound quality perspective, my late 50´s Grundig was a lot worst in recording sound but way better than this
After having used reel-to-reel machines for 65 years now I have NEVER used one, or seen one used, at 1 7/8" before. However at an old AM station that I worked at we had a logger (don't remember the brand) that ran at 15/16". Now THAT was slow!
I am a 63 year old man living in South Asia who love music. I watched this whole video of the open reel tape playback and listened to this recording of music programme (Hit Parade) done in the year 1970 off a FM station in San Diago, California, USA. (I hope that this station was a FM Stereo transmitting station.) I listened to the songs (only parts here). Its so good! Its the time i started listening to music when i was a small boy. That golden era of the 70's! 😊 Many nostalgic memories came to my mind! 😊 Thank you for uploading this video and sharing the information!! 🎉🎉🎉
The 1 7/8 IPS speed is the same as the cassette speed, but their tape was 1/8 inch and much thinner. I started out my sound life at about 8-9 years old with a little reel-to-reel my dad gave me. Later I had other ones to long to tell here. But my point is that slow speed has some high frequency loss but the worst is the distortion by compressing so much sound in such a short spot. Keeping the recording volume to the tape a bit lower was helpful as well, like he did. You can hear the distortion is the "S" and "T" sounds. On the cassette side the improved tape quality helped but the compression was still there. MP3 over compression is bad as well.
The sound quality at 1 7/8 ips can sometimes be quite good, cassette tape is this speed. unlikely to deteriorate with age with magnetic recordings. What's can have big effect at that speed is any azimuth mismatch between record and playback. Easy to check without losing calibration, push gently against the playback head to slightly tilt it either way at a time and see if the sound brightens.
I agree. Considering it's age, I find the sound of this tape at 1 7/8 ips to be acceptable. I'll have to try to test the head alignment to see if anything improves.
@BrettDarien I realised after listening more that it sounds like had been taped off AM radio during night hours. AM has a top end frequency response of about 5 kHz which kind of matches up with 1 7/8 IPS. So if had been recorded at 3 3/4 would only had reduced wow and flutter. There are many many tapes still around in thrift shops etc, of course these days if your playback doesn't have the right speed then you can after digitisation apply a correction including EQ etc.
@jagmarc I don't usually see reel to reel tapes in thrift stores around here, but I have bought a couple of reel tape lots from Ebay for pretty cheap and have found some interesting things. One of the tapes I have has some radio shows of Cousin Brucie that someone recorded from Sirius XM.
@BrettDarien I once found a real gem some years ago , an amateur reporter vividly and clearly describing unfolding events as he watched out of an upstairs window while a civil disturbance was going on. It this platform had been around it would had made a great posting.
@kennixox262 My dad loved the Coronado/San Diego area. We would of lived there if it wasn't so expensive. Sadly my dad passed away in 2009 and was never able to fully enjoy retirement.
@@BrettDarien The average home price in Coronado in 2025 is 3.5 million dollars. Was lucky to have inherited my condo from my father who himself was stationed in Coronado at the end of WW2 , a radio man on some sort of airplane. He used the condo for his west coast business. I could never afford to buy anything like it now and feel fortunate enough to have it.
@kennixox262 You are lucky indeed, enjoy it. There's no way we would of been able to afford anything in the area. My dad was a blue collar worker, and I am too now. I was lucky to find a house for cheap about ten years ago. It's nothing fancy but it's all I need for now, so I'm happy.
Hey Brett, I used to have a TC - 280 from a couple of years after yours. Loved that little machine - sounded fabulous. It really only came into its own (it was a Christmas present in the early '80s when I guess I was maybe 12 or 13 - I recall seeing "Only Fools and Horses" Christmas special - might have been the one where he went to Amsterdam) a few years later when I figured out how to mess with the bias and pre-emphasis curves. Couple that with a modern say Ampex tape, keep the running gear scrupulously clean & you could chuck the specifications in the bin. It sounded just great @ 3-3/4 & 7-1/2, but @ 1-7/8 owing to the seriously inhibited treble, everyone "thounded like thylvestor - thufferring thuffercath!" really only intended for speach. I adore open reel!!! To my mind, digital media is a little like ear-video by which I mean that rather than a continuous feed, in accordance to the sampling frequency, your ears are presented with a flickering audio image whose volume or intensity varies within the constraints of the bit rate. In the late 90's/early 00's domestic videotape was encoding audio in the rotary video component capable of acheiving the incredible bandwidth required for video - I'd love to hear the results of a no-holds barred state of the art tape machine today compared with the best that digital can do.
@jamesportrais3946 Speaking of videotape, some people have used their VCRs for recording music. Hi-Fi audio on later VCRs is near CD quality and you retain that quality even at slower tape speeds, so you can record up to 6 hours of high quality audio on a standard T-120 VHS tape. Never thought to try that back in the day.
The best way to save 41 minutes is 41 K . Wav format uncompressed on a slow burned CD. Make spares. Hide them from sunlight. Iron oxide recordings take a beating mostly from magnetism loss, but can print through layers. Playback works by applying a small bias, and thus each play reduces the recording.
The clarity is amazing, actually. I know that the frequency response is minimal at that speed, but it's still great. I know at 7 1/2 ips, this tape deck sounds incredible. I have the Sony TC355 and the clarity from a CD is incredible. I think the weakest thing on these decks is they're rim driven and things can slip easily causing some WOW and flutter.
@pcallas66 I have done some test recordings with this machine at 7 1/2 ips and it does sound quite good. While I still prefer cassettes for recording for their convenience, there's no denying that reel to reel can give impressive results especially for their time.
I have some tapes of that age too - old recordings of glam- and prog-rock from the beginning of the 70’s, recorded at 9.5 cm/s from FM radio. My tapes: 1) Lost a lot of amplitude. They were recorded at 0dB, now they are at approx -20dB 2) Lost even more treble Seems logical, that the tiny particles, that hold the treble, are more prone to lose their magnetic information.
I got a tape at a garage sale that is someone at home during a party or something, playing an electric organ. I date it ca. early 70s. There is even a typed playlist of the songs in with it. No names or details of player. The oldest tapes I have that I made are from 1977.
I have a similar recording from 'Stereo 101 KHJ-FM'. I believe the Hit Parade format started in 1968. 1970 was the last I heard. My recording was made in 1969, at 7 1/2 but mono. I'll have to learn how to share it.
@gdwatts7407 I recorded the audio in Audacity and exported it as an uncompressed .wav file for this video. The entire recording is also archived on RUclips at the link in the video description.
@@BrettDarien I think they definitely were. This sounds exactly like other Drake-Chenault stations of the time. This would also explain why the announcers are different from one song to the next. Their automated tape systems took up entire rooms. It's really amazing to see in action if you want to go down the RUclips rabbit hole.
You're lucky the tape did not have lubrication problems. Lots of reel-to-reel tapes lose their lubrication after 10-20 years and the friction produced on the playback head produces squeals which drown out anything on the tape.
i have older but much better in all senses , as the Akai X-165D, the X-4000DS had also amplifier and speakers but it was a good sounding open reel deck, really slow speed ,i had a late 50´s Grundig, a huge one with 7 speeds, this one looks really slow , one would expect a lot better sound as i have a lot of reels from late 60´s and the sound is way above this one´s quality, but seems a cheap model from Sony and being from Sony is already not sogood as other cheap but good recorders like Tascam or Revox in stereo , 4 track recording this because it was in my father´s home studio , the Tascam in a few years more appeared the more tracks stereo recording that would make really nice stereo recordings comparen to the 4 track limited, also the mixing tables were already very good and a lot of improvements could be done directelly in the table, this of course, if using high quality microphones who were really expensive, i´m using now a Akai from 788 that read some info. about it saying it was sold from 78 to 84, the GX-4000D, it´s still well built but one being used to the 1970 model makes it seem not that good in building qiuality, but soundwise both are excelent
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Thank you for sharing! I got to transfer my g/f's tapes her father made during his 2nd tour of Vietnam in the late 60's, complete with artillery, aircraft and other distractions! As a bonus, one of the tapes was direct from 93 KHJ and Johnny Williams playing The Beatles, Herman's Hermits and more. Nothing sounds more appropriate than "No Milk Today" in lo-fi direct from radio with that "vintage", booming sound. Nostalgia at its finest!
It's interesting how our emotions become diferent just listening this old analogue recordings.
Yes, I agree! 😊
That’s one of the reasons why the Mellotron sounds so emotional, divine and magical.
Thanks so much for sharing. I really enjoyed this.
Incredible video. Old recordings can be so interesting.
1-7/8 Is indeed slow, but if the machine is calibrated correctly, it can sound fairly good. Some of the old Muzak services that played in businesses were played from tapes at this speed.
Cool sounds. Thanks for sharing.
What a great tape it brings back memories of when I taped songs off the radio when I was a kid.Thanks for sharing.
I used to record off the radio as a kid myself onto cassette tapes. My dad would play them in the car on road trips. Even now as an adult I still enjoy recording onto cassette using streaming radio apps like tunein as an audio source.
I wish today’s music could sound this good
My dad had one of these back in the early 70's. That machine was great. It had SOS (sound on sound) that let you sort of do multitrack work. Although it was a one shot deal. Once you laid down some sound on top of existing sound, if you made a mistake you had to start over from scratch. Great seeing that reel to reel again.
I've never tried the SOS feature but I'm definitely intrigued by it. Sounds like it can be a way to dub your own vocals over music, that'd be cool.
Even though this deck is more of a "budget" model without all the bells and whistles, it does everything you need it to do and it seems to do it very well.
@@BrettDarien My parents were in a small folk group called The Hilarys. They used SOS to add vocals and things. I think all SOS does is allow recording without turning on the erase head. It worked well back then although like I say, any mistakes and you had to start over.
Thats perfect sound for that speed. Usually radio recordings, that speed was fine (for AM). For FM the differences would have been significantly cleaner at either of the higher speeds
But this was a FM recording from a FM Stereo channel in the year 1970.
This speed is okay for a AM band mono recording.
@@janath9118 the speed in never ok that slow no matter the source but AM radio isn´t high-fidelity so you might had it right only not that good of a sound quality perspective, my late 50´s Grundig was a lot worst in recording sound but way better than this
@ I'm agreeing with that
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for watching!
After having used reel-to-reel machines for 65 years now I have NEVER used one, or seen one used, at 1 7/8" before. However at an old AM station that I worked at we had a logger (don't remember the brand) that ran at 15/16". Now THAT was slow!
I am a 63 year old man living in South Asia who love music. I watched this whole video of the open reel tape playback and listened to this recording of music programme (Hit Parade) done in the year 1970 off a FM station in San Diago, California, USA. (I hope that this station was a FM Stereo transmitting station.) I listened to the songs (only parts here). Its so good! Its the time i started listening to music when i was a small boy. That golden era of the 70's! 😊 Many nostalgic memories came to my mind! 😊
Thank you for uploading this video and sharing the information!! 🎉🎉🎉
The sound reminds me of listening to an AM radio as a child especially in my parents car.
The Drake ,Chenault format of the late 60's and 70's.There was also hitparade 68 and 69 .
Correct. HitParade came out in 68 and continued through at least the mid 70's. Was used by a good number of stations.
The 1 7/8 IPS speed is the same as the cassette speed, but their tape was 1/8 inch and much thinner. I started out my sound life at about 8-9 years old with a little reel-to-reel my dad gave me. Later I had other ones to long to tell here. But my point is that slow speed has some high frequency loss but the worst is the distortion by compressing so much sound in such a short spot. Keeping the recording volume to the tape a bit lower was helpful as well, like he did. You can hear the distortion is the "S" and "T" sounds.
On the cassette side the improved tape quality helped but the compression was still there.
MP3 over compression is bad as well.
The sound quality at 1 7/8 ips can sometimes be quite good, cassette tape is this speed. unlikely to deteriorate with age with magnetic recordings. What's can have big effect at that speed is any azimuth mismatch between record and playback. Easy to check without losing calibration, push gently against the playback head to slightly tilt it either way at a time and see if the sound brightens.
I agree. Considering it's age, I find the sound of this tape at 1 7/8 ips to be acceptable. I'll have to try to test the head alignment to see if anything improves.
@BrettDarien I realised after listening more that it sounds like had been taped off AM radio during night hours. AM has a top end frequency response of about 5 kHz which kind of matches up with 1 7/8 IPS. So if had been recorded at 3 3/4 would only had reduced wow and flutter.
There are many many tapes still around in thrift shops etc, of course these days if your playback doesn't have the right speed then you can after digitisation apply a correction including EQ etc.
@jagmarc I don't usually see reel to reel tapes in thrift stores around here, but I have bought a couple of reel tape lots from Ebay for pretty cheap and have found some interesting things. One of the tapes I have has some radio shows of Cousin Brucie that someone recorded from Sirius XM.
@BrettDarien I once found a real gem some years ago , an amateur reporter vividly and clearly describing unfolding events as he watched out of an upstairs window while a civil disturbance was going on. It this platform had been around it would had made a great posting.
And at the moment, I am at my vacation condo in Coronado. Interesting how things pop up on RUclips. Weird and creepy.
@kennixox262 My dad loved the Coronado/San Diego area. We would of lived there if it wasn't so expensive. Sadly my dad passed away in 2009 and was never able to fully enjoy retirement.
@@BrettDarien The average home price in Coronado in 2025 is 3.5 million dollars. Was lucky to have inherited my condo from my father who himself was stationed in Coronado at the end of WW2 , a radio man on some sort of airplane. He used the condo for his west coast business. I could never afford to buy anything like it now and feel fortunate enough to have it.
@kennixox262 You are lucky indeed, enjoy it. There's no way we would of been able to afford anything in the area. My dad was a blue collar worker, and I am too now. I was lucky to find a house for cheap about ten years ago. It's nothing fancy but it's all I need for now, so I'm happy.
I'm 8nterested in how ALL OVER THE PLACE the music is.
Hey Brett, I used to have a TC - 280 from a couple of years after yours. Loved that little machine - sounded fabulous. It really only came into its own (it was a Christmas present in the early '80s when I guess I was maybe 12 or 13 - I recall seeing "Only Fools and Horses" Christmas special - might have been the one where he went to Amsterdam) a few years later when I figured out how to mess with the bias and pre-emphasis curves. Couple that with a modern say Ampex tape, keep the running gear scrupulously clean & you could chuck the specifications in the bin. It sounded just great @ 3-3/4 & 7-1/2, but @ 1-7/8 owing to the seriously inhibited treble, everyone "thounded like thylvestor - thufferring thuffercath!" really only intended for speach.
I adore open reel!!!
To my mind, digital media is a little like ear-video by which I mean that rather than a continuous feed, in accordance to the sampling frequency, your ears are presented with a flickering audio image whose volume or intensity varies within the constraints of the bit rate.
In the late 90's/early 00's domestic videotape was encoding audio in the rotary video component capable of acheiving the incredible bandwidth required for video - I'd love to hear the results of a no-holds barred state of the art tape machine today compared with the best that digital can do.
@jamesportrais3946 Speaking of videotape, some people have used their VCRs for recording music. Hi-Fi audio on later VCRs is near CD quality and you retain that quality even at slower tape speeds, so you can record up to 6 hours of high quality audio on a standard T-120 VHS tape. Never thought to try that back in the day.
The best way to save 41 minutes is 41 K . Wav format uncompressed on a slow burned CD. Make spares. Hide them from sunlight. Iron oxide recordings take a beating mostly from magnetism loss, but can print through layers. Playback works by applying a small bias, and thus each play reduces the recording.
The clarity is amazing, actually. I know that the frequency response is minimal at that speed, but it's still great. I know at 7 1/2 ips, this tape deck sounds incredible. I have the Sony TC355 and the clarity from a CD is incredible. I think the weakest thing on these decks is they're rim driven and things can slip easily causing some WOW and flutter.
@pcallas66 I have done some test recordings with this machine at 7 1/2 ips and it does sound quite good. While I still prefer cassettes for recording for their convenience, there's no denying that reel to reel can give impressive results especially for their time.
I have some tapes of that age too - old recordings of glam- and prog-rock from the beginning of the 70’s, recorded at 9.5 cm/s from FM radio.
My tapes:
1) Lost a lot of amplitude. They were recorded at 0dB, now they are at approx -20dB
2) Lost even more treble
Seems logical, that the tiny particles, that hold the treble, are more prone to lose their magnetic information.
I got a tape at a garage sale that is someone at home during a party or something, playing an electric organ. I date it ca. early 70s. There is even a typed playlist of the songs in with it. No names or details of player. The oldest tapes I have that I made are from 1977.
I'd love to find more tapes with old radio recordings like this. It's like time traveling to the past, back to a simpler time.
I have a similar recording from 'Stereo 101 KHJ-FM'. I believe the Hit Parade format started in 1968. 1970 was the last I heard. My recording was made in 1969, at 7 1/2 but mono. I'll have to learn how to share it.
I'd sure like to hear it! I'm always interested in old radio recordings. I hope you're able to share it one day!
You should archive this for posterity in digital format.
@gdwatts7407 I recorded the audio in Audacity and exported it as an uncompressed .wav file for this video. The entire recording is also archived on RUclips at the link in the video description.
Sounds like KBKB was a tape-based automated station at the time?
Drake-Chenault Hit Parade '70 presumably?
@JaredLekites If you listen closely you can hear some pops and crackles during some songs, so I think they were playing records.
@@BrettDarien well a lot of Drake-Chenault tapes were sourced from vinyl in the earliest days of their services
It is certainly possible they were playing vinyl that was recorded to tape. Would certainly be easier to work with.
@@BrettDarien I think they definitely were. This sounds exactly like other Drake-Chenault stations of the time. This would also explain why the announcers are different from one song to the next. Their automated tape systems took up entire rooms. It's really amazing to see in action if you want to go down the RUclips rabbit hole.
You're lucky the tape did not have lubrication problems. Lots of reel-to-reel tapes lose their lubrication after 10-20 years and the friction produced on the playback head produces squeals which drown out anything on the tape.
i have older but much better in all senses , as the Akai X-165D, the X-4000DS had also amplifier and speakers but it was a good sounding open reel deck, really slow speed ,i had a late 50´s Grundig, a huge one with 7 speeds, this one looks really slow , one would expect a lot better sound as i have a lot of reels from late 60´s and the sound is way above this one´s quality, but seems a cheap model from Sony and being from Sony is already not sogood as other cheap but good recorders like Tascam or Revox in stereo , 4 track recording this because it was in my father´s home studio , the Tascam in a few years more appeared the more tracks stereo recording that would make really nice stereo recordings comparen to the 4 track limited, also the mixing tables were already very good and a lot of improvements could be done directelly in the table, this of course, if using high quality microphones who were really expensive, i´m using now a Akai from 788 that read some info. about it saying it was sold from 78 to 84, the GX-4000D, it´s still well built but one being used to the 1970 model makes it seem not that good in building qiuality, but soundwise both are excelent
Your power cord was a scary sight to behold.