Heads to tubes - what's that about?

[Eldorado]

I've seen some descriptions of open reel decks being fed direct from the tape heads to tube amplification, bypassing the deck's internal electronics. Can this be done with any deck? And is it something a lot of people do, or well beyond the technical capabilities of most users?

[vinyldavid]

Well, some decks have a direct tape head out, as in the case of my Teac A-6010 (still gotta sort it out. It stumps me), it takes the form of a pair of RCA connectors. Could be run into an external tape head preamp.


With other decks (the A-6010 is the only one that I have experience with that has the head out) you'd have to wire some wire directly from the headblock to the back of the machine, and then into the tape pre.


I'd say that it's pretty darn hard, if your deck dos not come fitted with it standard.

Some older R2R decks came in 2 pieces, and will have the tape ehad out, but I do not know which ones.

Hope this helps.

[Eldorado]

Thanks, yes it's helpful. The only reason it caught my eye in the first place was that I've been reading up a little on tube amplification, particularly with reference to kit builds. Not something I want to get into for now - for a start my knowledge of schematics and wiring is practically nil, and I'm perfectly happy with the solid state system I'm using - but in future years I may do that, probably as an addition to my present system, never a replacement.

What I've see so far is talking about directly wiring the preamp into the head block - so that was more what my question was driving at.