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1960’s Reel to Reel connections 
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:27 pm
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HI,
Those of you following me on Twitter will probably know that by now I have several large boxes of tape and a 1960’s Tandberg tape deck. IT was my grandfather’s, and the person who had it is downsizing and I said that I’d take it and digitise all the tapes. I am, clearly, a fool as there are an awful lot of tapes. My grandfather has done in the 1960s and 1970s what we are doing today - fed his iPod with as much music as he could get. He was a major hi-fi person, and it appears that he paid £99 8/- for the thing - a lot of money. He also indexed every tape - recording details of the composer, artist involved as well as what settings the tape player was using and what other kit he ran the signal through. It is bordering on obsessive, but it is a collection that is very throughly documented and could be more complete than the BBC has!

He was very much ahead of his time - had he survived the 1980’s and carried on, I think he would have found the whole iPod thing fascinating, and my plans to have a media server would be something he would have wanted to do himself.

Anyway, background painting over. The crus of the matter is that I have to connect this tape deck into a Mac here and get recording. I have the necessary leads. I have a 5 pin DIN lead which gives me 4 RCA jacks. One red, one yellow, one black and one white. From what I can tell, the red and white jacks are input, which leaves the black and yellow leads as output. The burning question here is - which of the colours would be the left and which would be the right?

The audio quality is amazing - given that it’s tape that is 30-40 years old. I’ve listened to a section couple of the tapes for testing purposes, using the headphone jack (no volume - but then headphones did that separately at the time) and through my MacBook Pro’s headphone jack. Barely a hiss or a pop on the bits I listened too, and a very rich audio picture. My plan is to record at CD quality and create a master library, and crunch those down to AAC files for storage and playback on iPods. A distribution to members of the family who want a copy, and then (hopefully) find a BBC archivist who could take the physical copies. I also hope to transfer the index to an electronic format, but that’s a LOT of typing - there are 6 ring binders of it.

I now know where my obsession for minutiae comes from. I did not know him for very long (family history and all that meant that I only knew him for about 2-3 years before he died), but it appears that we were very much alike.

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Paul
brataccas wrote:
your posts are just combo chains of funny win

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Sun Jan 31, 2010 8:52 pm
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What's a life?
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:27 pm
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I found another lead with more normal colour coding, so all is well.

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All the best,
Paul
brataccas wrote:
your posts are just combo chains of funny win

I’m on Twitter, tweeting away... My Photos Random Avatar Explanation


Mon Feb 01, 2010 12:32 pm
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