WOW! Nice collection. Scary to realize how many of those i've used over the years.

Thanks, John. I've pass along the information.

I thought we were reaching back a way with our BetaMax deck but many of the decks in the museum pre-date it by quite a bit. I still remember the first wire recorder I used, for a theatre project in 1952. We've come a long way in the past 50+ years!

Jack

Thx for that link, John! Hadn't seen any of those "newer" wire recorders. We just finished transferring some old wire and reel stuff from the late 30's and early 60's for a farm organization that has some really fun old content, I wish I'd known of this company a while back. Even Googling for "wire recorders" didn't bring these guys up in any of the first few pages.

When I first broke into broadcasting we had an old "Magnacord" recorder for phone inteviews at the 500 watter I worked at.
Originally it was a wire recorder but had been altered for tape.
Used to pray it wouldn't run out 'cause you'd need an engineering degree to rethread it!
Turntables as big as wheels, and transcriptions that played from the inside out!
And in TV 2 " video tape that required a cooling device half the size of my present studio!
Marconi Mark iv cameras that needed enough light to blind you just to get an image.
Often wonder if we'd continued to perfect the analog world, and digital hadn't happened where we'd be.

Analog came quite a ways. 15 years ago i used a good Sony studio model Hi8 camcorder (sorry, don't remember which model) that had a better image than my current miniDV camcorder and wasn't much bigger than a couple of VHS cartridges side by side. It got a very decent image in normal room lighting. The edit bay at the local public TV station was about 4x6 feet and contained enough power to handle just about any edit or effect anyone could imagine on both Hi8 and VHS. All that equipment probably cost less than $25,000 total.

Only 15 years before that our state-of-the-art at the high school was an RCA B&W camera that weighed about 70 pounds and produced an almost-recognizable image in broad daylight. Our recorder was a 2" Ampex unit that weighed well over 100 pounds. I remember the AV director complaining when we dumped that stuff for 3/4" UMatic. She complained bitterly that such a small tape could never record a decent image. True, it was color, but it was another 10 years before we got a color camera to go with it.

I used one of those Revox A77 units for sound effects in a local theatre for almost 2 decades. I never found anything more convenient or accurate for cueing until i was able to burn my own CDs. It's amazing how good some of that ancient equipment really was.

In college back in the late '60's a bunch of us nerds pored over the product literature for the Revox A77. We were audiophiles (or trying to be, anyway) and on a college student's meager budget we thought the hot setup would be to use the A77 for recordings, since the A77 back in those days was one of very few machines that could do an excellent job of recording out to 18KHz or so at 3 3/4 inches per second. Tape was expensive, and we rationalized that in no time the capital cost of the A77 would be written off.

Today, one of my little Sharp Minidisc recorders ($60 on eBay) can make a cleaner recording.

I've been in the audio and video recording biz for a long time and the longer I'm in it, the more machines I have to keep and maintain just to play back all the old, obsolete formats I've used over the years. I actually kind of enjoy threading up my Sony BVH-2800 1" Type-C video deck. It sucks up a lot of power, makes a lot of noise and it requires a bit of tweaking using a waveform monitor and vectorscope, but all the flashing lights and dancing meters along with the big reels and head drum spinning away, it's really pretty cool in a complex electro-mechanical way. Certainly a lot more entertaining than putting a MiniDV cassette in a camcorder. .

I mentioned this in a post some time ago, but isn't it curious how there is a bunch of highly desireable "vintage" audio and film gear, but no "vintage" video gear whatsoever.

John

No 'vintage' video gear???

My boss has a wharehouse FULL of it, he didn't call his old company Oxide City for nothing. We've still got one 1" machine that does regular dubs and a few running quad machines elsewhere.

I don't know if there's still any in working order but the bit of gear that totally blew me away was the old Ampex 2" cart machine, that was one monster piece of engineering.

Bob.

Bob,

Yes, there is vintage video gear, but very little, if any, of it is sought after like vintage audio gear.

Is the Ampex 2" cart machine an ACR-25? It was the first automated robotic library system for the recording and playback of television commercials. That thing was pretty amazing the way it grabbed a cart from the large rotating 24-cart carousel and then used a vacuum column and air pressure to get the 2" tape into the threaded position into one of the two transports. And it did it VERY quickly (as I remember, it could play a series of 10-second spots back-to-back in any order you wanted.) That thing was REALLY impressive to watch. It was equally impressive when it screwed up. RCA sold the same device as the TCR-100.

John

Used to program one of those ACRs.
They were fairly reliable.