Head direct-out and after-market playback electronics

astrotoy

VIP/Donor
May 24, 2010
1,547
1,017
1,715
SF Bay Area
Agreed that there are many new entrants in supplying prerecorded tapes, including a very important one, Analogue Productions, which through all of its licensing agreements and vinyl reissues has better access to the back catalogues of so many labels. Tape Project, which got the movement started served that role, but has been stepping back in recent times. I am seeing many new small companies, mostly in Europe, coming on board, and the people like Ed Pong (UltraAnalogue), Jonathan Horwich (IPI) and Bob Attiyeh (Yarlung) continue their fine work.

As for new machines, it appears that starting from scratch is much harder than it looks and we have only one new company, Ballfinger, who has a mainstream pro or prosumer machine on the market in the past few years, with several notable failed startups.

However, there are many sources of restored decks from mostly very small companies or individuals who have chosen to specialize in rebuilding or restoring one brand or one model of tape recorder. The big buzz that came a few years ago was focused on just a few restored machines and mostly Tape Project tapes. It wasn't a big explosion that died down, but was something that appeared to be new, with great sound, irresistible to the audio magazines. Then, after a year or two, it was no longer new, and was replaced in the publications by the next new thing. Since the market has always been small (and will, I think, be for the foreseeable future) it doesn't need the constant infusion of publicity to maintain itself, especially since just about no one that I know (and I know most of the major players) is depending on R2R tapes for their livelihood.

Most of the restored machines that receive publicity range from around $10K to close to ten times that (our OP's machines are typically at the top of that range). Names like UHA (Greg Beron), J-Corder (Jeff Jacobs), ATR Services (Dan Labrie), ATAE (Fred Thal) and more recently Mara Machines (Chris Mara) are well recognized. (Please add others I have missed.)

However, there are others who do very good work with machines at significantly lower price points. I just bought a starter machine for my daughter and son-in-law which has been totally restored by a retired professor whose hobby is to restore one particular model of 2 track 15ips machine (Otari MX5050 BII), and he does between 12 and 20 a year. In the past 3 months I know three other people who have bought his machines. (PM me if you want contact information). So there is a cottage industry out there. One piece of evidence that R2R (2 track 15ips) is not dead is that used machines in marginal working order are going for many times the price that they did a decade ago. Go to the reverb.com website and check out the machines for sale and some of the descriptions.

Larry
 

Ron Resnick

Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Jan 24, 2015
16,017
13,347
2,665
Beverly Hills, CA
If one can afford even Greg Beron’s least expensive machine I think UHA is the “no fuss, no muss” way to go!
 

c1ferrari

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
May 15, 2010
2,162
51
1,770
Hi, all,

More commercial titles appear to be available, albeit the price of entrance is steeper than say - a decade ago.
 

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