Re: [ARSCLIST] S-S-S and tape baking

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My impression was same as Lou's -- back-coated Shamrock was brown oxide. If there was also black 
oxide back-coat sold under the Shamrock brand, as I think David is saying, I haven't seen it but I 
sure wouldn't doubt it had SSS problems since Shamrock was an inherited brand that Ampex got when 
they bought Orradio/Irish.

Here's another thing I'm not 100% clear about -- what were the consumer brands for Scotch 226/227 
and for Ampex 406/407 and/or 456/457? I think Ampex 456/457 was Grand Master, but I might be wrong 
on that.

Dave Lennick brings up OTR collections. Most of what I've been paid to transfer are quarter-track 
(ie 4 separate programs), 3.75IPS, usually dubbed from an equally bad tape sources, dubbed a few 
generations back from scratched transcriptions or off-air with a weak signal. And they're usually 
recorded on scrap Signal Corps tape, typically old Audiotape or Ampex 641 type, usually 1 mil. It's 
amazing anything audible is there but voice recordings can have surprisingly limited frequency range 
and be full of dropouts and still be audible if not enjoyable. I believe the telephone company did 
all the science on this in the early part of the last century (it's also what perceptual encoding 
for digi-compressed formats is based on). I'm not complaining that OTR collectors want to send 
business my way, but I've questioned them whether they wouldn't do better just buying some, most of 
all of their favorites from Radio Spirits. I think it's partly the fact that these are THEIR tapes, 
dammit, better quality options be damned.

One other thing -- Richard is right that old acetate tapes can and usually do get vinegar syndrome, 
but the big problems I've encountered with acetate tapes, whether they smell like a jar of vinegar 
or not at all, are warpage and the fact that they can be attacked by mold which literally eats the 
tape. Anyway, this thread was about SSS, so I was just sticking to that topic for now. But Richard's 
right that pretty much all tape breaks down in some way over time (and there are ways we don't yet 
know), and having one copy of anything is never a good idea but has been the norm for most of the 
history of private, institutional and master recordings.

-- Tom Fine

PS -- back in the day of professionally-staff/professionally-built/professionally-maintained 
recording studios, all good engineers and nearly all clients would insist on running two machines 
during sessions, and would usually insist on safeties being made as soon as an edited master was 
made. The fact that many clients chose not to save the unedited "B" reels in too many cases is a 
whole other story.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lou Judson" <loujudson@xxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, June 04, 2006 7:11 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] S-S-S and tape baking


A radio company I worked for in the 70s and 80s used hundreds of boxes
of Shamrock - which we knew was cast off and substandard Ampex, but
they were on a tight budget - and all of it had brown oxide and black
backcoating, except a few random reels that were not backcoated. All
was 1.5 mil. Much of it is what I now have to transfer to digital, and
some of it is nasty stuff.

Fortunately they switched to Scotch 176 and all of that has been
excellent to play now, still "broadcast quality" as it ever was even
though it was duplicator tape.

<L>

Lou Judson • Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689

On Jun 4, 2006, at 3:15 PM, David Lennick wrote:

> YES..all variations of back-coated Shamrock are suspect, and these were sold under other names 
> including
> a Radio Shack house brand. As far as I know there was no 1.5 mil black back-coated Shamrock (only 
> brown,
> which was usually 456)=