Just purchased a TEAC 80-8. questions about alignment!

[chris ryan]

hi,

1/2 inch 8 track reel to reel. stoked!

anyone know where to get an alignment tape for this thing?
according to the manual, i need an IEC tape at 15ips.

i'm guessing it's hard to find these nowadays?

i'm also pretty much clueless on how to get tape for this thing, as well as pretty much anything else i need to do to get it sounding good.

any suggestions? thanks!

[The Scum]

http://home.comcast.net/~mrltape/

[skywavebe]

Hello Chris,
The head alignment of 80-8 does not drift so easily and thus the need to adjust the heads is not a good idea unless you have al the equipment needed beside scopes, you need a good AC millivolt meter with dB scale and a few other things like a sine wave generator and attenuator. If you touch the head alignment and even get it right, you are not done as messing with the heads then requires you to at least check all of the playback parameters and then once those are adjusted correctly then do the record calibration for the tape you are going to use. 8 track machines when gone through right can take from 2.5 to 3 hours to complete the job. I personally don't like people taking short cuts in alignment as it leads to errors all along the way. Once you see the cost of a new alignment tape, a used dual trace scope is not such a bad investment- I have purchased them from select vendors on E bay.

[mrb]

Hi,
i got this MRL tape(this is the one for one inch recorders, find yours. You can order IEC or NAB): http://cgi.ebay.com/MRL-1-NEW-proaudio- ... ltDomain_0

They are quite short, so you need to rewind a lot to to adjust 8 tracks.
I got a D-Mag from them as well.
Maybe you find those links useful:
http://www9.dw-world.de/rtc/infotheque/ ... agrec.html
http://www.barryrudolph.com/greg/azimuth.html
There is a great article on alignment in the Tape Op book (vol II).