Re: [ARSCLIST] Early stereo mass market tapes

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, definitely. And, "in-line" and "stacked" were used interchangeably really early on. As I 
understand it from the Ampex list, Ampex was far ahead of the field with the first duper lines (3200 
and 3200B) and they also were successful early on at making high-quality stacked heads so the 
stacked standard took hold despite Magnecord and others. Interestingly, Ampex's earliest half-track 
duplicators had staggered record heads, with the top track in a separate cup from the bottom track.

I believe that Ampex garnered a lot of knowledge in building the first 3200's from Leon Wortman's 
home-made duplicating place in NY. Leon wrote an article about it in Radio & TV News in I think 1951 
or 1950. He hung a roomful of Ampex 300 half-track mahines on a common signal buss and paralleled 
all the remote controls. I don't think his setup had the duplicator headblock (no erase, separate 
record heads for upper and lower tracks) or that it went above 15IPS, although you could 
special-order 30IPS 300 audio decks back then so he might have used those. I forgot if he had a bias 
buss and common oscillator, too, although I can't see the need if it's just a roomful of 
synchronized recorders. The thing the 3200 did was take a lot of parts out of the slave machines. 
All they were was transports and heads, with a common record and bias units and a single control 
panel.

To my ears, very few mass-duped tapes were done really well, but when a place was on-target, the 
results were excellent. Too bad low-noise tape was invented back then.

-- Tom Fine


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Dnjchi@xxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 11:31 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Early stereo mass market tapes


> In a message dated 10/17/2006 9:34:18 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
>
>
> I'm  trying to find out some history of the early stereo hifi era,
> specifically the  handful of
> companies that sprang up to make and market stereo tapes. This  would be
> circa 1955-56, when the
> first commercial mass-duped 2-tracks were  out. What was the business model
> for a company like
> Livingston or Bel  Canto? Were they basically run like boutique record labels
> or differently?  Aside
> from those two and Stereotapes, who else was making original  recordings as
> opposed to licensing and
> releasing stuff from major labels  or European sources?
>
>
>
> It should be noted that the first commercial stereo tapes were either
> stacked or staggered, depending upon the heads utilized.
>
> Don Chichester