Re: [ARSCLIST] NAB vs. DIN recordings

[David Lennick <dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric Jacobs wrote:
>
>
> It's rumored that the DIN heads reduce the need to swap head
> stacks when switching between full-track mono and half-track
> stereo recordings.  If so, might this flexibility be a potential explanation 
for the prevalence of the DIN heads?
> Might there be other performance advantages to the DIN heads
> that made them popular?

I should have remembered that myself! The CBC plant in Edmonton had only mono 
output feeders, but could receive stereo programming from what we then still 
called the "FM Network" (later CBC Stereo, later Radio Two). Programs that were 
produced there such as RSVP, which I hosted, were fed to the Mono network but 
sometimes the tapes were shipped to Toronto or elsewhere, and mono with 
butterfly heads was pretty close to full track.

That was the place where we had no leader tape, so the people in Current 
Affairs would just take a piece of blank tape and thread it in backwards and 
cut it in as leader. Much fun when the tapes were reused.

dl