And somewhere, there's a guy who has an Ampex tape that's great and his Shamrock isn't. Mileage varies. But Ampex---especially the 456---had problems often enough with enough users, including pros, to develop a reputation.
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In fact, many stations had an aircheck deck that was officially sanctioned. PDs used them for airchecks, and sales used them for live reads and management for legal reasons.
The first use of that in my experience was with Mooney Broadcasting around 1971.
I’ve used C-110 tapes that had decent quality, but yes, the C-120s were generally mediocre at best.
Has anyone ever used the very rare C-180? I never have, and the only place I ever saw it firsthand was in a Tower Records store in the Los Angeles area during a 1983 visit.
I got a few TDK D180 tapes still in their wrappers from the late 70s. I used one way back when and it imploded. The others I just keep to show friends those existed and probably will never be used.
I had excellent results using 110-minute Type II high-bias tape and Dolby C NR.
120 and even 150-minute high-bias cassettes did exist, but were very rare. Most of the ones you can find were only sold in Japan.
120 and even 150-minute high-bias cassettes did exist, but were very rare. Most of the ones you can find were only sold in Japan.
Same here. I was always surprised by the significant quality difference between what was available on C-110 versus C-120.
The true hardcore cassette aficionados never used anything longer than a C-60 due to the sturdiness of the tape.
I had forgotten all about the C-150 option. Never saw one in person. C-120 seemed to be easily findable.
Now did anyone ever use Elcaset? An audio cassette on steroids, overlooked and forgotten format.
Elcaset - Wikipedia
I've got an AD-180, which I think was thrown in as a bonus when I bought three boxes of AD-90s from Burstein-Applebee in Kansas City. (B-A is much missed.) Indeed it one time had an encounter, shall we say, with a capstan. I was able to splice the tape back together and the tape is still OK. Among other things, it has a brief aircheck of Kansas City's KCMO (810) from 1978. I treat it very gingerly.
If I recall correctly, TDK was the only manufacturer that sold C-180s.
An LP album side usually fit perfectly on one side of a C-90. When CDs came along, and the physical restrictions on length were less constraining, album "sides" (by that point a notional concept) got longer; then a C-100 or C-110 was called for.
Never saw a C-150. C-120s were sometimes available even in the early 1970s, though not all that common.
I saw one, but had no interest in it. By that time, you could get pretty reasonable results from cassettes, especially with a good tape deck.
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First one I saw was when I visited KMPC in Los Angeles in April of 1973, a slow-speed logger tape. 24 hours on a single reel. My attention was drawn to it because on that day, they were reviewing the audio from their own coverage a few days earlier of the murder of KMPC traffic reporter Jim Hicklin.
For PD airchecks, the cassette skimmer activated by the mic switch seemed to be the favorite method. I saw my first one of those when I joined KSLY in San Luis Obispo in February of 1974.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I modified the cassette recorder at KMYX the first time I was there (middays and chief operator) to have a front panel toggle that could switch it so the motor would only run when the relays for muting the control room speakers activated. (It was still in service three years later when I returned as APD/MD/mornings.)
At Y97, the engineering genius John ("J.D.") Strahler designed a control circuit that activated the cassette recorder when you turned on the mic and deactivated it a few seconds after you turned off the mic, for less abrupt transitions on playback.
And that shows that even in medium markets, that was a fairly standard practice where the DJs were managed by their PDs based on airchecks.
From my chats with Tom Rounds and Ron Jacobs, I was given the understanding that jocks at Drake stations were recorded. I presume some kind of mike-activated reel to reel setup, but I have no proof other than this being the simplest method and easiest to replay.
When I was doing jock sessions with Mega in Argentina around 2000-2006, they'd send me scoped air-checks in MP3's online and I'd play them from my end. In other words, there were lots of ways to do this,m even at great distances. Many of us still used cassettes through the 90's as they were cheap, portable and did a fine job on voice quality content.
My long-dead bosses thank you for the compliment---San Luis Obispo was 30,000 people. Medium was a long way away.
I don't know how it worked in RKO's non-union markets (but I think that was only Memphis), but I know from friends who were at KHJ and KFRC that, at least through 1970, the studio engineer just rolled a reel in the control room when the PD asked for one. Critique sessions were accomplished either by production engineers making a second-generation scoped version or (more commonly) editing down the reel.
Those airchecks where the engineers made the second-generation scoped copy are the ones we have, intact, from those stations---and they exist largely because the union rules prohibited the jock or PD from editing down the tapes themselves.
From 1971 on, under Ted Atkins and his successors, studio-quality airchecks like those pretty much vanished, which makes me think they switched to mic-activated skimmers.
I recall Elcasets when I was in college in the early 1980s. They were used in the language labs when I took Spanish class.
Also, in my memory, cassette tape/deck quality reached a near parity in sound quality with consumer grade open-reel tape/decks around 1979. This was the year I first learned of Type IV/Metal Tape through publications like Stereo Review.
Also, in my memory, cassette tape/deck quality reached a near parity in sound quality with consumer grade open-reel tape/decks around 1979. This was the year I first learned of Type IV/Metal Tape through publications like Stereo Review.
Type IV “metal” cassettes sounded fantastic, but you had to have the proper tape deck that could handle them. The high signal output would overwhelm a Type I or II cassette player, causing distortion on audio peaks. I’ve also read that Type IV could be rather rough on standard tape heads.
I had a deck that was also capable of Type III (ferrichrome) but that tape level never seemed to catch on, in my experience.
I had said earlier that I had a home cassette deck that could not handle metal tapes. Doing a little searching, I find that I was wrong (it's been 41 years). So count me among those who cheaped out, because I went for Type II tape instead of Type IV.
Are you sure you're not confusing the RCA Sound Tape Cartridge with the Elcaset? After RCA's cartridge failed in the consumer market, they shifted it towards educational use, and IIRC new equipment for it continued being manufactured until the early 1970s, so it's possible some of that was still in use a decade later.
Metal tape needs the proper bias level to record, but there is no problem with playback. And it was chrome tape that was accused of wearing out tape heads, but that was back when it first came out in the early 1970s, and was actually a pure chrome formulation. By the 1980s, most "chrome" tape was actually cobalt-doped ferric tape. The Japanese developed that formulation to get around DuPont's patent on chrome tape.
This was also my experience in my waning tape trading days, whenever I listened to metal dubs of compact discs on any type I cassette deck. The result was completely clean -- and incredibly crisp for obvious reasons.
I'm not sure how wise it was listening to albums like "Vulgar Display of Power" using that arrangement, but my ability to hear 19 kHz pilot tones from unfiltered FM receivers was never affected by it.
I don't think I ever saw any C180s in stores, had a couple in the early-ish 80s that a GF had given me. She said they were typically used in some sort of medical equipment, she had worked in that field, that's where she got them. Don't remember any more details on it.
Tape was so thin that even with oxide coating it was almost transparent. Don't think I ever used them for anything.
I remember the RCA STCs when I was in college. The college radio station tested them for recording shifts done by the Mass Com students.Are you sure you're not confusing the RCA Sound Tape Cartridge with the Elcaset? After RCA's cartridge failed in the consumer market, they shifted it towards educational use, and IIRC new equipment for it continued being manufactured until the early 1970s, so it's possible some of that was still in use a decade later.
What you're saying may be the case. This looks familiar to what I was using in 1984.Are you sure you're not confusing the RCA Sound Tape Cartridge with the Elcaset? After RCA's cartridge failed in the consumer market, they shifted it towards educational use, and IIRC new equipment for it continued being manufactured until the early 1970s, so it's possible some of that was still in use a decade later.