Highest of Low Tech

[pasithea]

Perhaps this is some kind of lesson on the dangers of being too cutting-edge, or at least in shopping without more careful consideration.

I've had this box in my closet for several years. It's a huge box. It's filled with my dad's reel-to-reel tapes. When I started cleaning the week before last, I decided it was time to do something about this box.

Now there's some neat stuff in it. Old jazz, several hours recorded live at woodstock, and my dad's journal from Viet Nam, so throwing it out (immediately, at least) is out of the question.

So I looked around on e-bay and found what sounded like a good tape player at a reasonable price and got it. It arrived today and it was indeed a nice tape player. It functions quite adequately... Up to a point.

See, the picture had but two marks for tape speed. LOW and HIGH. The boxes of tapes had two speeds listed. 3.75 and 7.5 which I assumed corresponded to LOW and HIGH. As it turns out, this is not the case. There is in fact another tape speed of something like 1.5 and this was in fact the 'LOW' the machine referred to. My dad, being the audiophile he is, naturally, had mostly tapes of the highest quality (fastest speed) so a large percentage of the tapes won't play on this machine.

I can't even be clever and record the tapes at half speed and then correct them on the computer as the machine's motor is just not designed to handle the additional weight of the extra footage on the 7.5ips tapes.

So... Crap. Now I've got a huge box of tapes and a heavy stinkin' reel to reel player and I guess I have to buy another one. :(
I don't feel I can really return it as it does work and it's not the seller's fault I'm uneducated about these things. Still. Suck.

Comments

[foxgrrl]

I have two (0.25") reel-to-reel decks in storage. (Though I think I stretched the belt out too much on one of them.) Also, 1.5ips is slow, and 7ips is fast. (ipc=inches per second) (Though I thought that the typical tape speeds were 1.5, 3, 6, 12, 24, ..., 60ips (~40MPH? You can record video on linear tracks at 60ips) (I used to have access to a 16-channel 1-inch-reel deck that went up to that speed.)

It should be easy to just play the tapes back at the 'wrong' speed, and then correct them on the computer. (Assuming that you know the exact scalar to use, or there are reference tones (know freq.) recorded on the tape somewhere.)