Bones007 wrote:
This particular tape was 7 1/2 ips and made by Pickwick who claimed all their tape was Red Seal RCA tape. Don't know if that was a good tape or had a better reputation at the time over other tapes or not.
Yes and no.
I'm guessing this particular Pickwick tape had material mostly or completely licensed by RCA - like Hugo Montenegro or Henry Mancini - because I have seen Pickwich tapes where the material was mostly Columbia - like Johnny Cash - duplicated onto Sonotape - which for awhile was a subsidiary of Columbia Records.
I've also seen Pickwick tapes that were mostly Capitol releases (Nat King Cole or Wayne Newton) duplicated onto Audiotape which along with it's disc counterpart Audiodiscs was a part of Capitol Magnetics for awhile.
The big blank tape labels in those days were of course Scotch, Audiotape and Ampex.
RCA Red Seal was a midline quasi-off brand product from the late 50s when it was introduced to maybe the early 70s when it became a REAL off-brand before it ceased production entirely.
One of the only reasons it came to be ``popular'' (but not in a real high-quality sense) was because by the mid `60s - RCA reel decks were starting to supplant the usual and quasi-ubiquitous Wollensaks and Magnavoxes that the schools were using.
When a school bought more than four at a time - like in a Language Lab that used a lot of tape anyway - they got a free PALLET of tape for it - all of it RCA RS branded.
In the early days you could always tell who made the midline and off-brand tape by the color - those who subcontracted to Ampex got tape that looked and behaved just like Ampex and the same for Scotch and Audiotape.
Later on when they were farming it out to custom houses that had templates for everybody's formulae you couldn't tell who was who anymore - that's when the quality really started hitting the skids.
The other reason RCA tape was around a lot from the late 50s to the late 60s is - they had SO MUCH custom tape made for their proprietary format cassette player in 1958
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBwRSxTmdWw that it was leftover for YEARS afterward.
They wanted to cut the tape use for 2-track stereo 7-1/2 IPS in half by coming up with 4-track quarter inch - which really hadn't had too much development before 1957 - and also wanted to cut the tape use in half AGAIN by coming up with a formulation that would sound at least acceptable for music at 3-3/4.
This is right around the same time that all those 1-7/8 and 3-3/4 single-tape equivalents for multi-disc LP box sets were coming out for easy listening and jazz - first as demo tapes that would be given away or sold very inexpensively along with a player purchase - and then later as commercial or quasi-commercial (mail order) material.
The selling point was the time - 3 hours for 3-3/4 both sides - or double that amount for 1-7/8 - meaning you could have a whole afternoon's worth of commercial-free music while housekeeping or a full evening's worth while entertaining without having to change a record every 20 minutes or a tape every half-hour or 45 mins.
Of course they failed on both the quarter-track as well as the half-speed counts to begin with - but three years later in 1961 the `Bi-Sonic' 4-track interlaced stereo tape system was born - for 7-1/2 only - so they only got to half their goal to begin with. And really they only got to less of their goal than that because the head configurations weren't that much improved from their 2-track counterparts from the late 50s.
The people that weren't paying attention and bought these ``half-price, half-speed half-quality and half-baked (quarter-track) tapes by accident - broight em home and found out they couldn't play them on their 7-1/2-only decks - were usually the same people that bought all the other failed formats when they came out.
My great uncle had a whole raft of these - and a very small handful of the 1-7/8 IPS demo-tape versions mentioned above - that he bought in Chicago at the duplicator's office (Ampex, GRT ITC and American Stereotape all had centers in the North Shore) as unboxed overruns for half-off the half-off retail price they were going for in the Music Mart - and a ton of unloaded Sound Magazine cartridges in the same fashion.
Since the reels had no labels on `em - just a record catalog number written in grease pencil - long before I was born he'd started winding these off onto all these unloaded SM cartridges - wrote what it was in grease pencil on the face of the tape - and tossed em in in a box unplayed with the SMC player to be discovered by me 15 years later while in middle school with the grease pencil worn off and the masking tape losing its adhesion.
By then the Phonlog had a lot better ability to be cross-referenced - so with the tons of unlabeled 3-3/4 IPS reel to reels that hadn't been loaded into empty carts yet - I must have spent everyday all through summer vacation at the Music Mart poring over the mostly-unused Catalog Number Reverse Directory section where you could look up a catalog number and it would tell you what the record or tape was.
At night after dinner and homework - I would wind them onto empty carts, put the carts back together - write the title on MASKING TAPE instead of grease pencil and put them away in the same box.
20 years later the masking tape has disintegrated and the grease pencil has worn away so I'm back to looking up record catalog numbers - in seconds on the Web instead of over days in the Phonolog.
By the time I was done I must have had 1500 tapes and an equal number of empty 7-inch NAB-hub reels that I sold to the local radio station for 3/4 what they were paying for `em new.
I kept a few as takeups and for 5-inch reels I inherited where the tape was falling off the edge - and kept the few regular-hub 7-inch for all the leftover pancake tape I would get on a hub from the duplicators - and everybody went home happy.
The other odd thing was - Uher was real famous in the ENG world of radio because it had a better sound than cassette which was still a new technology in 1965 - and had more speeds than a normal recorder - up to 7-1/2 and down to 15/16 on some models.
But since they only carried 5-inch reels instead of the normal 7-inch - they experimented with 6x play tape - quarter-mil and 3600 feet on a 5 inch reel when the normal was 600 ft which would give 15 minutes at 7-1/2. Divide out for the ridiculous amount of time you'd get per side at 15/16. Enough to put e.g. whole conferences or seminars on one tape.
I had a handful of copies of the Uher demo tape so I decided to sacrifice one and see if it would hold up at the higher speeds (7-1/2) Nope- too thin. Plus the wind and rewind was just hell on the tape stretching it all out and making it unuseable.
So I wound one into an SMC since it was dubbed for 1-7/8 playback and the SMC player had both speeds - meaning I got my 6 hours on a side without having to lug a huge 7-inch player out and set it up and thread it and etc etc etc.
But people bought the reel to reel versions of the quarter-track 7-1/2 IPS in 1961 because the earliest 4-track players could also play the original 7-1/2 IPS 2-track stereo with a flip of a dial that moved the head down by a handful of mils so that it would pick up the strongest part of the 2-track signal which was always in the lower part of the track - not something you could safely do with stereo LPs on a mono player of the period.
Meaning all this early ITC and American/Stereotape and GRT and Greentree and all these dubbing houses - all this leftover RCA Red Seal tape that was intended to have been made for the Sound Magazine got bought up by the pallet full by all these off-brand dubbing houses to run off all these 3-3/4 and the odd 1-7/8 IPS prerecorded reel titles.
Now granted when the first batch of Sound Magazine tape was being sold off yeh it was pretty good because even tho the tape was 4 yrs old it had been specially designed to have ACCEPTABLE - not TERIFFIC - sound at 3-3/4 - meaning if you used it at 7-1/2 - the top end would be better than conventional tape by being able to survive the 4X dubbing process and still have a decent high end to it.
So a lot of those early-to-mid-60s 4-track RCA-made (or using RCA product) stereo tapes might actually sound pretty good on a modern player - almost as good as the 2-track version.
But later on after that first overrun ran out - RCA RS tape became just another Budget Tape the same as the Shamrock was for Ampex or etc etc etc,
Bones007 wrote:
I have bought regular recording tapes that had lots of drop outs and cheaply made where you could see the ripples in the tape , (I.E. Realistic Supertape).
Well remember a lot of that was as they say rejects from the major labels. The white and pink boxes especially were near-to-edge cuts of whatever major manufacturer happened to have the next batch ready to sell. meaning some months your Supertape might be TDK off-runs, another month it might be Ampex another month it might be Scotchor whoever.
But it was always the off-runs and rejects from the major labels - only a hair-width better than the Dollar Tape you get in the white box.
Bones007 wrote:
I never came across a manufactured pre-recorded tape that was this bad before ...I thought it might be a rarity, but after reading your post , It sounds like this was common.
Common like I said especially on the budget-label tapes. Stick to the major labels - or tapes made before 1966 - and you should be alright.
Bones007 wrote:
I guess I have been lucky to not have got one like this before.
(LOL) Like I said - since the album is not worth anything on reel - spool it off onto a 5-inch NAB hub reel - blank it out and use it for a half-track mono or 2-track stereo recording and tell me if it's really a bad tape or just a bad dub. Be interesting to know.