The most expensive music format (in the world)

even the most unobservant person can't fail to have noticed the return of vinyl records from the wilderness in recent years that market for these has exploded so the question today is is the same thing going to happen to reel-to-reel now the other reason I am addressing this is because in 2015 the verge website published an article entitled reel-to-reel tape is the new vinyl so the question is is it odd what exactly did they mean by that well it's quite a complicated answer as you'd expect for start off you're not going to better go into a shop any time soon and buy a new pre-recorded reel-to-reel tape over the counter however reel-to-reel tape is enjoying a bit of its own mini resurgence amongst the very high-end hi-5 community it's not on machines like this in fact the tapes that they're producing won't even play on this machine so first off I'm going to have to explain exactly why that is and the different kinds of reel-to-reel tapes and formats that came out over the years so I best start off by just talking about the machine that I've got here this is the pioneer RT 909 a very popular open reel recorder from the very tail end of the home consumer reel-to-reel market now despite being made by the Japanese company pioneer it wasn't sold in Japan they were all for exports only a lot of them making their way over to Germany where there was still a big market for these open real recorders and that's where I bought this one from it was sold there from 1979 up till 1984 at which point pioneer discontinued their reel-to-reel range but those last few years for reel-to-reel really were its golden era the machines that came out during that time were some of the best models ever made these machines were positioned as the ultimate home recorder for the enthusiast and were often able to record onto the larger ten and a half inch diameter reels of tape compared to the more traditional home formats of seven inch reels of course that Senator half-inch real size meant she could either record for longer or record for the same amount of time but at a higher speed which would give you better now of course these machines will play back those seven inch reels and record onto them as well but it wasn't as important as it had been because at this point in the 1970s not many people were buying the pre-recorded albums that came on those 7-inch reels anymore now before I bought my pioneer I was using this Akai GX 6 2 5 and in many ways I prefer the way this machine looks over the Pioneer with its analog vu meters it's lighter buttons but there was a reason why I change machines it is because this one only plays in one direction now to demonstrate why that was a hassle I'll show you with this machine even though it does play in both direction so pretend it doesn't for the moment so what would happen is once you played side a of your tape the tape comes off like this you then have to get the spool with the tape on move it on to the other reel flip the empty reel over spool the tape back onto the empty reel again and press play to play the other side of the album which is usually somewhere in about 20 odd minutes or so now the way the RT 909 and other two Way play decks work is once you get to the end of side a you hear it fade out quickly get up from your chair before it unspools press stop and then press play to play it back in the other direction but this one goes a little bit further than that because it's got Auto reverse so no need to jump up from your chair all you need to do is that the end of side a add a piece of this a DC foil that will activate a sensor inside the machine which will make the tape run back in the other direction so you'll see it go through here activate the sensor it pauses for a second and then starts playing the tape back on side B and of course spooling it back onto the original reel again that was a former open real or reel-to-reel tape it's quite unusual because despite the fact the home machines use the same quarter-inch wide tape throughout the quality over the years declined the nineteen eighties releases the ones right to the end of the format will sound worse than those from the 1960s and it's more than likely that those ones will sound worse than the ones from the 1950s and to explain why we'll have to go back to the beginning then work away forwards right so if we start with a simplest version we've got a mono tape here we've got a single tape head underneath it the tapes moving from left to right and the audio is being recorded across the whole width of the tape but that means using quite a lot of tape and tape was expensive so to use half the amount or be able to record twice as much on the same amount what you do is you put a half width head in there so now you're recording on one half of the tape you get to the end you flip it over you record on the other half see getting twice as much on the tape however your recording quality is being reduced as well because you're they're only using half that width but if you want to create a stereo version what you do is you use the same head that you're using for that system you have one one way up one the other way up and you've now got yourself stereo the only problem is those heads are next to each other so that audio is reaching each head at a different time so there's a slight delay between them these are known as staggered heads and this was the first stereo tape system for the home and staggered head tapes had to delay the audio between the left and right channels and they sounded right when they went across the heads but shortly afterwards they developed a two-track tape head which meant you could now have the audio in sync but what it also meant was that this system was incompatible with the other one these are known as in-line heads so for a while tapes out to specify on the front whether they were for inline stereo or staggered stereo so you think this is the ideal we've got a nice simple two-track stereo system it sounds excellent as well the only problem is that it's expensive because it's using twice the amount of tape as a mono album would do so within a very short period of time they introduced full track which is the format that my machine plays but by introducing this we can now play the tape in either direction use half the amount of tape that we were using for the two track system but again of course you'll have notice we've reduced the width of the tracks this isn't going to sound as good as the previous system but it's all about cost because reel-to-reel tapes were very expensive and all the time they were out they were always competing with a much cheaper vinyl records but before I get to that for completions sake I just want to mention that the playhead in my machine which has 2-way play would look like this we've got four individual heads to would be activated when the tape moves in one direction and then to when it moves back in the other of course once you've got a tape head like that with four individual channels on it you can have quartered indeed there were some quad tapes and quad machines to play on them for a brief period of time and those used the four individual channels at the same time for front left and right and rear left and right but we'll move away from that we'll go back to 1956 now this is just two years after the launch of the first home stereo reel-to-reel machines in the US but of course those were really firm very early adopters with very deep pockets some of whom will have got bird by getting the staggered tape head stereo systems because now we've moved on to the stacked or inline ones but things are starting to settle down get a bit more momentum now there's a few more companies coming into the market and people are starting to buy stereo reel-to-reel for the home and this is the first chance that many people got to listen to stereo systems within their own house now it's something major record labels a little while longer to embrace the format but this is from capital this is their very first stereo tape to channel 7 1/2 inches per second for inline heads this is the introduction to stereo a demo tape really it's za one it's the very first one from 1957 and as is common with a lot of these stereo demo tapes it contains various sound effects as well as short snipping of some other recordings you can see the various recordings are on either side of this label here although the tape is all on one side because of course it's a two-channel tape so it just runs from left to right and it's only quite short as well because it's run at seven and a half inches per second but I can't play on my reel-to-reel machine because that's a four track tape machine so I've had to get myself a new machine so I could demonstrate this to you but not just for this then I'll show you something else in a moment but I've got a Reeboks b77 marked su there are the Reeboks b77 and the mark ii we're a range of really quite high-end semi-pro machines as you can see here this one costs one thousand seven hundred and ninety nine dollars around about 1980-81 whereas my pioneer cost 895 in 1979 so quite a bit more expensive and the b77 mark su was available in a lot of different specifications you could have four track you could have two track at different speeds I've got a two track machine here and what I'm going to do I'm going to play you some samples from this tape just a short amount but I want to mention to you beforehand that there's a massive dynamic range on here it goes from very quiet to very loud so if you've got headphones on I've warned you know let's just have a listen for a minute ladies and gentlemen it's one minute to midnight on New Year's Eve in Times Square listen to the roar of that crowd huh listen to it now in stereo a sound of New Year's Eve in stereo the vivid sound of reality itself the next example of stereo inaction takes us to the neighborhood bowling alley there's no doubt about it stereo is the sound of reality whether it's the sound of a strike being scored or a huge diesel locomotive getting ready to move out of the yards [Music] oh hell well that should have woken a few people up you don't hear dynamic range like that's anymore and I've got to reiterate that that tape is 60 years old it's from 1957 and it still sounds as good as that so why didn't reel-to-reel take over the home well your answer is because the next year in 1958 they introduced stereo records and stereo records were considerably cheaper than stereo reel-to-reel recordings which is why they kept trying to make them cheaper by splitting the tape in half making it from two to four track in this report from 1959 they mentioned that the stereo phonograph record player sales for 1958 accounted for 25% of the US market but stereo records themselves only accounted for 5% of retail sales so it's still very early days for the stereo record now at this point things look a little bit rosier for reel-to-reel tapes 70% of tape recorders produced during 1958 with stereo models however it's really just a drop in the ocean there were only one point nine million tape recorders in people's homes at the end of 1958 as opposed to twenty nine million nine hundred thousand record players whilst it sold four hundred and ten thousand tape recorders in 1958 they'd sold 4.1 million record players so really wants stereo record players had started to take hold reel-to-reel just could not keep up and people tended to use their tape recorders for recording rather than playing back pre-recorded albums what incentive though for people to continue buying their pre-recorded albums on reel-to-reel tapes was that when they sound good they sound really good the only problem is that those good sounding tapes got fewer and fewer as time went on that only had were gone from two-track so for track but by the time the eighties rolled around this had happened so what's happened here is to further reduce the cost of producing reel-to-reel tapes they've tried to get rid of as much tape as possible if I go back to this album here from the 1970s just look how much tapes in there and I'll compare that so this one which admittedly is for the very tail end of the releases you use that to send off a take said the eighties but you can see it's using half the amount there it's quite hard to see on that reel so if I get another clear reel this one is from the 1960s you can see twice the amount of tape on the one on the left is on the right and the reason is because Lionel Richie despite the fact he says he can't slow down he has done he's running at three and three-quarter inches per second which is half the speed of this tape here which is running at seven and a half inches per second a despite what the obverse might say if he is slower tape speed in half you're going to notice a significant reduction in sound quality and an increase in background hiss so those first tapes that came out in the 1950s those were running at seven and a half inches per second get into the 1960s we've moved across to four track tapes had you got to see a variety of seven and a half and three and three-quarters get into the nineteen seventies use seven and a half tapes are getting rarer and by the time you get towards the end of the seventies of into the eighties you're only really going to see three and three-quarter inch per second tapes for sale and nowadays it's those higher speed tapes the seven and a half inch per second version which are the ones favored by collectors quite often they will pay a significant premium for them they'll pay double the price for double the speed but for track open real tape really is now just a collector's market the last releases that came out on the former we're only available mail-order in the u.s. from Columbia house and they were discontinued in the mid-1980s however that's not the end of the story because in recent years a number of companies have started offering new pre-recorded open real tapes again but these are nothing like my full track tapes from the sixties and seventies they're even better than the two track tapes were in the 1950s they're more like studio masters because these tapes are running at 15 inches per second so an album is spread across two ten and a half inch reels arguably the most famous name behind these tapes is an organization that calls itself the tape project and it's advisable if you want to know more about these to go onto their website because there's a wealth of knowledge on there about the tapes themselves but also the machines that they recommend you play them back on now ideally you'd use a professional machine out of a recording studio but if you must you can slub it with a prosumer machine but they recommend replacing a lot of the mechanical components just using the machine to drive the reels and taking the audio itself off the tape head and putting it into a separate preamp you can spend a lot of money on this but if you prefer to go from already made solution head over to United home audio and they will sell you one of their heavily modified Tasker machines now these things apparently win all sorts of awards every time they show up at a high-end hi-fi's show but then again perhaps they should do because the more expensive of the range is twenty two thousand dollars and the cheapest while they sell is six thousand five hundred but notice there they've sold out for 2017 there's actually a waiting list for these but once you've got your machine you'll want something to play on it so why not get the album willy and the poorboys from Creedence Clearwater Revival yours for just four hundred and fifty US dollars and that price isn't out there it's kind of average for one of these sets these are in Euros and as you can see the two real sets up to four hundred and forty five euros now you might be asking why do they cost so much well two by two blank tapes isn't cheap as you can see here but then after that the whole process of recording them is very time-consuming and they're going back to the original master tapes in many cases as well let me explain how it works well a recording studio in the 1960s or 70s once they finish making an album would run off a number of production master tapes now there's only a small number of these but these companies selling these reels claimed to have got hold of one of these master tapes and then a running one to one duplicate copies off them real time and those are the tapes that they're selling on to you now what are the company says that they run off eight at a time but even that number you can only run off a certain number before you start wearing out that master tape now some of these websites are a little bit vague it's possible that they're creating another tape in the middle air making eight of the black one and then from that they're running another eight off each time to make a duplicate therefore not going back to that original master or wearing it out but I asked them this question and they haven't got back to me however another way of doing it is just to make a digital copy of the original master tape that you can run off as many as you want without wearing that original tape now digital is almost a swear word in these circles so I've noticed a number of these websites trying to avoid it but I've got a feeling analogy records is using a digital master they say they create an original master directly from their multitrack recording system that sounds like a digital system to me nowadays there are not against the idea of using a digital master far from it it makes more sense to me than making a copy of a copy off a copy or wearing out a master tape once you get that master tape duplicated you can then make perfect copies in fact in a recent issue of what high fire magazine there was an article about remastering the Brian Eno albums and for that they captured the original master tapes in high-res digital at 192 kilohertz 24-bit and then did some repairs on them to remove sibling asses and some clicks are being created by double tape machine before then using that digital master to create other versions of the album but regardless of how these 15h per second tapes have been mastered it's time for me to now try playing while now I mentioned earlier on there was another reason why I bought this particular machine and the reason is because this one does a speed of 15 inches per second some one aspect up presumably for studio work now when I bought this someone had replaced all the capacitors in it as well so it's as good as it's going to get really on the back here you'll notice is a sticker that says two-track CCIR CCIR is the equalization now tapes like this used nab equalization whereas when you get above 15 inches per second it's advisable to use CC IR which is also known as IEC now because NAB is a much more common standard on the tape projects website they explain why they're using IEC Equalization it goes into quite a bit of detail there but suffice it to say you need a machine with the right equalization to match the tapes or at least by the tape that can match the equalization on your machine so fortunately mine does CCIR so when I went to choose a tape I chose the options have CCI are equalization now for rather obvious reasons rather than buying a full four hundred and fifty dollar dual tape album from the tape projects instead I went over to analogy records and got hold of their 50 inch per second sampler tape for a mere a hundred and fifteen euros so this sampler tape contains a number of different artists these our artists are released on analogy records own label they do the recording of them as well and they've combined them all together here on one reel just to give a feeling for how good these tapes really are now this is a tales out tape that means that the tape has to be rewound before it could be played so you put it on the right hand rail on your machine and wind it on to the left one so that you play it and by the time you're finished it ends up back on the original reel again now I'll play your tiny snippet of this tape although it's all a bit academic really because of course you're listening to a stream digital file and the whole idea of this thing is that it's the best analog source possible however I'm gonna play you a little bit out of the first two trucks that you see on this card that's proved absolutely nothing really but from my end I've got to say it sounds excellence of course I tried it with my best headphones which i think was the best way to hear it and it really does sound outstanding now if you wanted to buy yourself a new reel-to-reel machine well nobody makes new ones that come to that I mentioned earlier on are actually refurbishing tasker machines that stopped being manufactured back in 2004 of course they're doing a complete overhaul it's not just a start up job but still nobody's making new reel-to-reel machines a couple of years ago though there was talk of Reeboks coming back with a new tape machine just for these 15-inch per second tapes as a playback only device and they were going to do that in conjunction with Horch Eros which is one of the companies that offers the tapes for sale it was rumored to cost a fortune in the tens of thousands of dollars but it was supposed to be out in the first quarter of 2007 scene audits now at the end of 2017 there's been no mention of it for quite a while the design concept images showed a very nice looking machine which was only a playback device but there's no mention of this anymore on the reebok sites or on Horch house however I noticed this name on the design images so I went on his website and missed no mention of it there either so some things happened I think the whole thing's been canned but it would have been nice to have a new machine out even if I couldn't afford it if you're on the Reeboks site they did start selling reel-to-reel tapes again back in 2015 but if you go on the store now it's not currently available however you can still get hold of tapes which I think would be the ones that sell from horch house themselves now just before we move away from this section I have a feeling that I haven't got into enough detail about how good this tape sounds so in my opinion which is the only one I've got each sounds as good as anything that I have ever heard if you ever get a chance to hear one of these 15 inch per second tapes jump on it because you'll be very impressed with it but of course that then leaves just the one question so the big question is how am I going to replace this machine with my suit rack 15 inch per second reel-to-reel cycle listen to these very expensive tapes and the answer is no one's enough for me it's just something I wanted to try it's a little bit like one of those track days red-letter day type things where you just try something out so there you go yeah that was good and then come back home we get afterwards I mean yeah it's brilliant they sound excellent these I think a lot of that though is down to the recordings and the mastering and things of course you can have a terrible sounding reel-to-reel tape and a good one the same way as you can with a record and with these of course they've done everything they can to make them sound good and I think they're the kind of music that they're playing on these lends itself to the format's as well you're that kind of acoustic type stuff I reckon if you've got a current pop record for example and put that on one of these it wouldn't sound any different than it does on an mp3 player so yeah interesting to try out but really if I was going down this route it's getting a expensive new machine rather than that old thing that I've got there buying 450-pound tapes every now and then there's a very cat's log of course grading everything the speakers at the amplifier and goodness knows what else and then on top of that how good is my hearing really would I be able to tell the difference so yeah an interesting thing to try out if you're interested in learning more about any of the things in this video there'll be links in the video description right there's just one extra thing I want to mention before I go and it's about subscribing to YouTube channels and I'm not necessarily talking about my own here this is just something that cropped up in the last week I noticed I hadn't subscribed to a couple of channels I've been watching though for years and the reason I hadn't is because I'm automatically recommended the next video that that channel produces because I've watched their previous one so it's quite easy to miss out on clicking that subscribe on in fact one of those channels was the 8-bit guy who you might be aware that we collaborated on a video in the past and I'm a patron of his channel and yet hadn't subscribed to it of course I've corrected that there on the channels are missed out on so all I'm saying is just have a look through your own YouTube and if there's a channel that you haven't subscribed to that you enjoy just click that subscribe button because it does help them out but that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 2,488,834

Rating: 4.9118052 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, reel to reel, vinyl, 15ips, reel, tapes, tape, 10.5, new tapes. tape project, listening test, reels, horch house, UHA, Opus 3, Analogy, High end, audiophile, stereo, 1957, 2017, best, first, master tapes, demonstration, analog, most expensive, ultimate, listening

Id: 5KHSz9Gi-II

Length: 27min 55sec (1675 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Ugeau]

one offre the best youtuber about hi-fi

[u/A_Reasonable_Man_98]

Love his videos

[u/silverdroid303]

You beat me to it, was just about to post this.

Well, it was convincing enough for me. I'm giving up my entire digital collection and will get one of those upgraded $6,500 machines. Mostly for the cost and inconvenience.