Just bought an early/mid 1960s r to r recorder. Now what?

[man of the hills]

Hello,

This is my first post at this great forum. I am glad things like this exist for hobbiests.

Anyway, today I went buming at the thrift stores for the first time in a long time thinking to myself that the days of finding good stuff was dead and gone because of eBay.

The second thrift store I went to didn't have much until I went into the basement.

There I found a great Pentron 4 track reel to reel recorder. All tube amplification with outputs for stereo line and more. With it came a seperate but matching Pentron tube amp and a box of some odd prerecorded and blank reel to reels.

Real clean which is a rariety in this neck of the woods these days. Someone took good care of it.

I got it home and the equipment works real good. A real steal for $10!.

However, is there anything I can do to tweak this great machine?

I took the seperate tube amped speaker apart and it looks like a simple wiring job that I see for modern tube amps at DIYaudio.com . However, the speakers in both the reel to reel and amp have a low hum when turned up all the way and slight high frequency buzz.

It is more so noticable when I run the signal through my stereo.

Any thoughs or suggestions on this?

Also, there is a slight rusting near the tape playback and recording head. It doesn't effect anything important and is just cosmedic. How can I clean off red surface rust?

I may be interested in replacing the tape head and possibly modifying the recorder for stereo sound recording. Are there any suppliers on line that I can look up to find better fidelity replacements for the existing parts?

Thanks in advance.

[aurelialuz]

the low hum means you need new power caps, something very understandable considering the age of the machine and something you'd want to do anyway.

i'd think parts are going to be nigh on impossible to find unless you find a donor.

alex

[man of the hills]

the low hum means you need new power caps, something very understandable considering the age of the machine and something you'd want to do anyway.

i'd think parts are going to be nigh on impossible to find unless you find a donor.

Thanks for the info.

I will take a look and see if I can see what type of caps need replacing.

[fear of texas]

smoke a lot of grass and munch a few vics and make some fucked up multitracked tape loops (tape loops so big they run around your living room) and run it through a marshall half stack turned to 11. oh yeah, play em backwards, too. then put that bitch on eBay and include the terms "warm, fat, analog tube sound" and make some coin off of it.


or you could just get it cleaned up and see what it sounds like.

[fear of texas]

oh yeah, i forgot!!! "VINTAGE"! if you eBay it, dont forget the term "VINTAGE"! it'll be worth an extra $100 that way!

[MechaGodzilla]

Sounds pretty rad. ...any pictures of this beast?

Peace,
A

[markpar]

I love your avatar, MechaGodzilla. Is that the evil monkey that lives in Chris's room?

-mark

[soundguy]

tape heads are very particular things yielding a whole science onto themselves. They are also EXPENSIVE. IF you are really strapping it on, probably the smartest thing to do is to find someone who knows tape machines to take a look at what kind of amplifier is working after the headstack and you might be able to see what kind of heads wil work on there. To take a mono deck and run it in stereo, you'll need to fabricate a second channel amplifier to MATCH the existing amp in there, or create two new ones, essentially just using the transport. Unless the machine is the holy grail, I wouldnt suggest putting the money in, you can get an AWESOME deck that cost thousands for very little hundreds today, money you would easily spend turning perhaps a worthless deck into an expensive worthless deck. If you get it recapped and it sounds good, enjoy it for what it is, to convert it to a stereo deck I would imagine would cost you AT LEAST $400 or more (probably a lot more to do right) and for that money you can get a studer 1/4" or ampex 1/4" or MCI 1/4" if you look.

As for rust, coca cola works pretty well to remove rust, depending on how severe it is.

dave

[man of the hills]

Thanks for the replies.

I'll post pictures later on. The machine is from about 1959 or 1960. I figure that out since the contents of the reels do not predate those years.

There is no info on this unit on the web nor is it being sold in eBay auctions.

It is a stereo unit but the hitch is if you want to hear it in stereo you plug the other amp in to get both channels. I bet there is a way to take that 1/4 output jack and make it so both channels can be lined out into a modern stereo system.

That is what I am going to try for.

BTW, out of the tape reels it seems that the pre-recorded ones didn't stand the test of time. They are wobbely, brittle and shed a great deal. The other blank tapes, Scotch and Philco look as if I can erase what is on them and use them as "new" tape.

I see the recorder head is missing or disconnected. There is a head before the sound head but I can't tell if it is for recording.

Listening to the home recorded reels I believe that the reel to reel unit allows one to record in one channel mono. I will go through my parts catalogs and see if anyone makes a good stereo recording head.

For a couple of $ it wouldn't hurt to try but I'll have to see if there is a way to internally amp the mic in stereo or just use a preamp. It would be great if I could get this to record in stereo.

As suggeste by someone in this thread I was thinking all along of getting one of those $400 range reel to reels recorders but can't afford to do at this moment.

[man of the hills]

[philbo]

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