Here are a few shots from the long abandoned interior. I love the old reel-to-reel machine in the last pic. 

I'm guessing it's a tear down.

Jody Thornton wrote:

RadioActive wrote:

Here are a few shots from the long abandoned interior. I love the old reel-to-reel machine in the last pic.

That's the cutest board console

Hard to tell but the tape machine looks like an Ampex. What great workhorses those things were.

I have to say I'm partial to the Revox PR-99 half-track machines.  Those were the silver-faced ones that seemed to share a lot in common with the older B-77.  They just recorded well, and sounded very natural (and neutral) to me.  I always preferred editing stuff at 15 IPS, and those Revox decks had good editing blocks, for my use any way.

I know when it comes to open reel machines, a lot of radio prod folk seem to like Otari decks.  I just find that the Revox PR-99's had a very simple and logical control layout.  Buttons were spaced apart nicely and the meters were legible.

Never got a chance to use an Ampex deck.  To both RA and FP, how did they sound?

RadioActive wrote:

Tape editing is a lost art but I could do magic on those things, and the challenge just isn't there in computer editing, although the latter is admittedly easier, you don't need a grease pencil and there's no splicing tape!  But when you made the prefect edit on a tape - especially on the ones which didn't always come easy - there was a sense of satisfaction you got that was like nothing else. 

I really enjoyed editing on open reel too.  There was more of a "get it right the first time" mindset to editing that way.  The thing that I do prefer on digital editing is that if I want to layer another track over an existing mix, I won't get the added noise from bouncing tracks, like I did with open reel tape.

That said, half-track tape running at 15 IPS was pretty darned quiet.  And in my experiences with open reel tape, I never used any outboard noise reduction, so that's saying a lot.
 

At first glance, that Ampex looked like the one I loved, but, on closer examination, I see that the buttons are the plastic late 1960s generation.  My favourite was one of the original pair of Ampex two track stereo recorders bought by CHQM AM & FM Vancouver around 1960 when they got their FM license and started doing some stereo broadcasting, with one channel on AM and the other on FM.  Multiplex stereo was not yet approved for use.  Those Ampexs had small metal buttons that had a much more solid feel to them, perhaps because it was impossible to "wow" those machines. When occasionally needed on a voice track, I could "hot pot" a start in the middle of a sentence even if there was no pause.