Did anybody ever build DIY R2R?

[niklasthedolphin]

Well, the question is in the subject line.

Did anybody ever build DIY R2R?

Mark Levinsons altering of the Studer can hardly be called DIY.

Maybe some Studio Technicians wanted specific features or wanted spec's upgraded or maybe an old grumpy guy always sitting welding in the basement did it from the ground up.

Tell if you ever heard about, saw or experienced anything related to DIY R2R or Cassette decks for that matter.

"dolph"

[vinyldavid]

I never did this, but I think that today in 2008, it would be easier to do than ever.

IMO, the hardest part of a DIY R2R would be the transport.

With the Advent of computers, it is possible to write code for motor control circuitry, and then all that you would need to have is motors that are capable of feedback, and just let the computer do the job of pitch control and the whole shebang.


Just a thought. *reelspin*

[Jay Pemberton]

Is this as opposed to, say, doing POOGE (Progressive Optimisation Of Generic Equipment; a term borrowed from the AUDIO AMATEUR folks) on a tape machine, like unto changing/upgrading various parts, bypassing some internal sections, etc.? That could become a sub-section of the DIY part of this site.

[kevinkr]

I did diy a stereo cassette player using a mono philips mechanism and a stereo head I purchased separately back in the mid 1970s. I used the original player's case and managed to fit in all of the discrete replay electronics. (Used 4 transistors per channel) It actually worked quite well, but the wow & flutter performance was not the best.. Also no Dolby and only the standard eq (120uS/3180uS IIRC) so playing chrome/chrome equivalent tapes never sounded quite right. It had an external supply and could even run on batteries. I actually built this thing in high school and it was inspired by an article in an Italian hifi magazine I used to read. (I think it might have been Costruire HiFi which is still around today. Literally "Build HiFi.")

In the 1950s and early 1960s there were a lot of decks (mechanism) only that you could buy and use as the basis for a homebrewed recorder. There are lots of articles about this in the AudioXpress published Audio Anthologies series which are reprints of old articles from what ultimately became Audio magazine. These machines still turn up from time to time and could be the basis of a diy deck project if you are so inclined. Another potential source for diy would be the old (A-G) '36 series Revox decks, best to find something with good stereo heads as modern stereo replacement heads whether half or quarter track are very pricey.

[Jay Pemberton]

Somewhere I have an old issue of either RADIO-ELECTRONICS or RADIO & TV NEWS (or perhaps when it was transitioning into ELECTRNICS WORLD circa 1959) that had full plans and schematics for building a set of stereo tape recorder electronics, all tube, with 'magic-eye' level metering and all. Terrible shame there was no way to get 95% of the parts for it in the late 1970s when the magazine was given to me....

I remember having Dad solder a pair of wires onto the leads to the record/play head of a Radio Shack 505A reel-to-reel, that allowed me to connect it to the electronics of Dad's Webster-Chicago wire recorder. I connected the wire machine's electronics to what I used for playing records then, and with this system, could dub records to tape without the awful ALC and its distortions, and slightly better frequency response. This was in 1977 when I was 13.

Later, I had some attempts at rigging a working machine out of the surviving bits of two or three dead machines too. I had a Radio Shack SCT-16 cassette deck whose transport had become unusable, and I'd fitted its heads to the mechanism of an old Sears cassette recorder, and used the motor out of a small, dead Radio Shack reel to reel recorder. It was a temporary get-by in mid-1982 until I got a new cassette deck that summer.

There was also the bad kludge of trying to rig heads and electronics from a wiped-out Teac/RS TR 3000 machine onto the wonky transport of a Toshiba PT 862D reel deck, in 1985....*headache* ....made redundant by buying an Ampex 354 as a moderate fix-me-up in 1988.