Sunday, April 27, 2008

DES: Hubs

What is a hub?.

A hub is the axis where a reel is put in a reel to reel tape recorder. There are two main standards about it, the european and the american.

The european hub is more or less than the same used in the 8mm projectors.




There are reels from 2.5" to 10.5" that need an european hub. Maybe ir's rare the use of this thin hub in the bigger reels, but were the common in plastic reels like Philips or Revox.






The american hub is wider, about 76 mm of diameter.




Except some professionals decks, reel to reel machines came with european hub as a standard, so to use a reel with american hub, it's needed an adapter.

Most reels with american hub are 10.5", but there were some rare exceptions like some 7" reels.

European to american hub adapters are known as NAB hub adapters and there were different types, from the cheapest made of plastic that were put first in the reel, and in second place in the european hub, to the expensive ones that were put directly in the european hub and then, the reel over them.

The first method is less confortable because to remove a reel and put another one, it's needed to remove the adapter from the reel table and put it again in the new reel.

With expensive adapters, the adapter irself is placed in the reel table as it were the natural hub of the deck, so when is needed to put a tape, the time used in the procedure is the same as the original hub of the machine were american.

American and european hubs weren't used in their respective productions. The common is always the european hub except in most cases, in the 10.5" reels.

Here are some examples of cheap NAB hub adapters:












Today some of these adapters are collectables pieces so their price is high, as occurs with the Pioneer PP-220 adapters.


Expensive adapters were maybe the common ones. Brands like AKAI, Teac, Otari, Revox, Basf... made good adapters that were put directly in the reel tables.









The best (and expensive too) hub adapters maybe are the metal Revox adapters. They were produced in different metal colors, the same that the metal reels produced by the brand: light aluminium, red, blue, black and gold.










Wednesday, April 23, 2008

VID: Spinning from 2.38 cm/s (0.9375 ips) to 76 cm/s (30 ips)

Each time one of those beauties appears in a movie, I try to figure out at which speed is running.
I've located some short videos where are shown different speeds with the same size of reels.


2.38 cm/s - 0.9375 ips




4.75 cm/s - 1.875 ips





9.5 cm/s - 3.75 ips




19 cm/s - 7.5 ips



38 cm/s - 15 ips




76 cm/s - 30 ips

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

PER: Pedro Sánchez

Pedro is a reeler who lives near Barcelona and has, possibly, the most important collection of reel to reels in Spain and one of the neastest I've ever seen.

He specially likes ReVox, but also hi-end machines in general.

Here are the pics he has just sent so that can be published.



Technics RS-1500



Technics RS-1506



Technics RS-1700



Technics RS-1500 US



Webcor



Revox PR-99 Mono



Revox PR99 MKIII



Revox PR99 MK III




Revox A700



Revox A77 MKIV



Revox A77 MKIII




Revox PR99 MKII



Sony TC-200



Sony TC-502-2



Tandberg 10XD



Tascam ATR-60



Tascam BR-20T



Tascam 32



Teac 32-2



Teac A-3440




Teac X-2000R BL





Teac 80-8



Philips N-4504




Pioneer RT-707



Pioneer RT-2022



Pioneer RT-707




Otari MX55



Nagra SNS





Nagra SNS




Crown 800



Viking 88



Fostex G16



Sony Elcaset



Studer A810



His Master Voice



Nagra IS



Akai GX-266



Akai GX-4000D



Akai GX-4000DB




Akai GX-636D



Akai GX-230D



Akai 1722L



Akai 1722W



Akai GX-202



Akai GX-4000D



Akai GX-630D



Akai GX-266



Akai GX-280D-SS



Akai M-10



Akai X-1800 SD





Different shots: