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Reel to Reel find - Beethoven ...

beammeup

pfm Member
Saw these in a charity shop (see pics) - I pointlessly bought both reels (I don't have a reel to reel player) - but wondered if the recording could have been done professionally or not?

And of course, I don't have a clue what's on the unlabelled reel.

Either way - I'm probably never going to listen to them unless anyone has a reel to reel in Norfolk where I can conveniently just play them out of curiosity.







 
That looks distinctly like home taping to me - and someone was careful enough to type the contents. Since there are no attributions to orchestra, date, source, conductor there is no way of guessing what may be actually on tape. Seems to a 4 track tape though and you will have to guess what speed to try first...

The second reel could be anything and seems to be the spare spool from the TEAC recorder used.
 
I expect it's mostly R3, and given the quality of the reels, probably done very nicely.

I'd be interested in buying the TEAC reel to use as a take up reel on my TEAC/Tascam deck, and the TDK just as a nice thing to have, and drop the recordings onto CD (or cassette, or Minidisc!) for you, if you are thinking of passing them on?

Just a heads up, tape from that period (appears to be late 70s-80s), especially Ampex, can be problematic due to the formulation of the binding material, which could mean that they're unplayable without special treatment.
 
I expect it's mostly R3, and given the quality of the reels, probably done very nicely.

I'd be interested in buying the TEAC reel to use as a take up reel on my TEAC/Tascam deck, and the TDK just as a nice thing to have, and drop the recordings onto CD (or cassette, or Minidisc!) for you, if you are thinking of passing them on?

Interesting thought... I wasn't immediately thinking about moving them on - however I'm curious now as to their worth. Perhaps I can PM you outside of this thread ...
 
Feel free, bearing in mind that the tape, especially on the TEAC reel, is an unknown quantity, so I'd basically be buying the metal reels, with the tape being a bonus if it's usable.

There are plenty of dreamers on ebay flogging replica, blingy OEM style reels for silly money, but have a dig around the ebay sold listings for values, see what you think is fair and let me know. I reckon the Teac reel is worth more than the TDK, and I'd not be interested in low-balling you, but equally not willing to pay some of the asking prices you see on ebay.
 
TDK LX is good tape, I have a couple of reels and it doesn’t go sticky or shed the way of Ampex etc. I think the striped leader on the other reel is Japanese too, either TDK or Maxell.
 
TDK is good tape, but it is (like a lot of tapes) sensitive to storage conditions. The lubricant additive can dry out resulting in a white dusty residue shedding all over the tape path, which I know from bitter experience is a pain to clean off, this also affects some of their cassette formulation incidentally, although Sony UX was the worst for that iirc.

The tapes above look ok to be fair, but a lot of these problems don't present themselves until you actually try to play them.

I'm not trying to talk down the value, btw, as I said I'm really only interested in the reels, and if the tape is good then it's a bonus, but you often don't know if it's good until l you use it.
 
If its recorded four track it will be a low speed, prolly 3 3/4 or 7 1/2
 


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