Reel to Reel?

Anyone know about reel to reel tape players?

We lost Jewel's grandmother this past January. The family has been going through her stuff, getting her house ready to sale, etc. Since I have a record player, and "like that old stuff," I was given a box of reel to reel tapes. That's sound reasoning right? While I do have a record player, I don't have anything to play reel to reel on.

Jewel's grandmother was a war bride, from London, England, Jewel's grandfather was in the Navy during WWII, so her grandparents met during the war and her grandmother moved to the US. Her grandfather retired from the Navy, but was stationed all over the country between WWII, Korea, and finally retiring in Memphis, TN.

Some of the reels I have are labeled, I'd guess music recorded off the TV from the Ed Sullivan Show based on at least one of the labels. However some aren't labeled, and according to Jewel's mom and aunt, her grandmother used to stay in touch with her family in England by sending tape recorded messages back and forth.

There's no guarantee there's anything on the unlabeled reels, but I'd sure like to be able to find out, and hopefully be able to save the recording digitally so I can share it with the rest of the family.

I figure recording software, via the mic-in on my laptop should be simple enough.

What I need to know about is the reel to reel players.

Any suggestions on what I should be looking for, or staying away from? I'll need something with some kind of line-out so I can hook it up to a computer. There's a lot to choose from on eBay, from cheap to holy crap, and portable to large television sized. I don't particularly want something that's huge, since I doubt I'll use it beyond this little project, and staying away from the "holy crap," priced stuff would be preferred as well.

Line out is easy, computer will be harder. Reel to reel is all magnetic tape with analog signals.

You are gonna need a digital converter.

In reply to SVreX:

As I understand it, if the line out is a 3.5mm jack, you can just plug it into the mic input on a computer. Your upload program is the "hard" part.

CDex is free and has a Record from Analog Input feature. There are other free and higher featured programs too.

Any player that will load the tape should be fine. Are they the large reels or the smaller ones?

Before you undertake the project yourself, this might be one of those time-cost effective things to outsource if you're only planning on doing it once.

I remember my uncle had one. They were pretty popular in the 1960's before good quality stereo cassette decks took off in the 70's. I've never seen one that was particularly small. They should all have line out jacks. Akai made some pretty good stuff. Seem to bring around 150 on ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Akai-X-200D-Solid-State-Reel-To-Reel-Tape-Recorder-Stereo-Custom-Deck-4-Track-/391782951318?hash=item5b38156996:g:RFgAAOSwjqVZF4OR

If you're not interested in the Ed Sullivan music and are only looking for anything where she's talking, don't worry about trying to find some high quality expensive tape deck - there were plenty of small, portable players around back in the day (I'm thinking of the ones the A/V club used when I was back in high school) that should be cheap to buy. Scour Goodwill or Craigslist.

Or, as suggested above it may be just as well to outsource the work if you have no further plans for reel to reel work.

How big are the reels? There were different size reel tape machines. The smaller "portable" ones that weren't so portable in the 50's used smaller reels approximately 4" diameter. Sometimes referred to as dictation machines befrore cassettes. Then came larger self contained reel to reel that became part of stereo systems in the 60's. I was a kid but remember these. One reel stored a couple hours of music. Might make a difference when looking for a tape machine.

Gotta love a good analog out for interoperability. Loads of options for recording from the line in on your laptop, it may even be native to the OS. You will probably want something that will compress it for you. On my Mac, I'd probably use Audacity. Not sure what the go-to would be for Windows.

They're all 5" reels with 600' of tape according to the boxes some of the tapes are in.

They don't all have boxes, but they all look the same.

I have one where are you?

In reply to dean1484:

Conway, Arkansas.

My dad gave me all his 8mm family movies covering 3 generations - I reshot the movies with another camera.

About 50% of the stuff was crap - some random family party and some guy dancing or jumping around in a dimly lit basement or my favorite my grandfather panning a lake in Canada where he was fishing.

I did get some good stuff that maybe 3 of us in our family liked - the younger members of family had no interest not knowing anybody in the movies. Who is that? Uncle Casey? Who is that again?

Keith Tanner wrote: On my Mac, I'd probably use Audacity. Not sure what the go-to would be for Windows.

Audacity.

This thing is local, Realistic TR-3000, and has been for sale for about a month, thinking about offering them a Benjamin and seeing what they say. I've spent more on dumber stuff.

In reply to Datsun310Guy:

Up until about 3 years ago, shortly after her husband passed, Jewel's grandmother spent time with, and stayed in touch with her kids, grand kids, and great grands. I believe if there's actually recordings of her and her siblings and/or parents on any of the tapes, all of the extended family will be excited to hear them.

In reply to bigdaddylee82:

I believe that Realistic would get the job done. Pluses are it's new-ish for such decks, and recently serviced with new belts. Most of these are going to be "barn finds" that haven't been used in decades.

I own this now.

I never made contact with that Craigslist seller, I continued to look casually, but never made much of an effort. Then yesterday I was "antiquing" in Joplin, went into an antique store (they're pretty loose with their use of the term "antique" up there, the place was a flea market) and found several reel to reels. Co-owner of the antique/flea market tinkered with and rebuilt reel to reels as a hobby.

We chatted for a bit, and I decided to purchase a cheaper Sony reel to reel he was selling. Money was exchanged, but guy wanted to show me how it worked before I left. I was grateful for the lesson and obliged, only to find out, it didn't work. So I'd just bought a inop reel to reel.

Guy was apologetic, and offered to make a good deal on one of his "better" reel to reels. After speaking to him, and discussing the features and pricing of the other reel to reels he had on display, I gravitated toward this Akai 4000DS. He had another one that was a little cheaper, had built in speakers and an 8-track player, but the speakers sounded real tinny, and I don't have any, nor do I anticipate getting any 8-track tapes any time soon.

We hooked the Akai up to one of his receivers, and played a Neil Diamond tape to verify it worked. The seller offered to knock a 1/3 off the price of the Akai for our trouble, we agreed, paid a little more on top of what we'd already paid for the malfunctioning Sony, and came home with an Akai 4000DS.

All in all, we paid more than we intended, still less than that one I found on Craigslist, got an education on how to work it, met some nice folks, and they even printed out the user manual for us.

Cool. Carthage has some nice little resale/antique mall shops too. When I have an English car to show, we go to their car show and walk the square.

let us know how the project goes. On a good news front, you can probably sell on that Akai what you paid for it.

It's been a few years since I played with real to real, I was a decent editor, but my late boss and mentor could literally edit out letters from misspoken words.

In reply to mad_machine:

Will do!

I figured out how to work the thing last night. Apparently my lesson didn't stick, I remembered most of what the seller taught me though, and the rest was fairly intuitive, with a little fumbling my way through it.

I hooked the Akai up to the home theater receiver, and listened to a couple of the tapes.

We played one of the unlabeled tapes, and another one that was pretty accurately labeled.

Unlabeled was a '60s rock/pop mix, and the labeled one was the same, but even better, between each song are the teenage versions of Jewel's mom and aunt (around 16 and 14 years old at the time) "DJ'ing" their mix. "That folks, was The Beatles," or "That was The Animals," with a teenage girl giggle before playing the next song.

Pretty funny to hear them as kids.

.

Knurled wrote:

Keith Tanner wrote: On my Mac, I'd probably use Audacity. Not sure what the go-to would be for Windows.

Audacity.

Also on Linux. Use line-in on the computer rather than the mic port, there's a difference.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

I don't have a "line-in" on my aging laptop. I only have microphone and headphone 3.5mm jacks.

However, my ancient desktop has an old ASUS 680i SLI motherboard in it that came with some kind of ASUS PCI-e 1X sound card, it's got an array of inputs and outputs, plus whatever the front panel is, HD/AC97? Maybe I should dust the cobwebs off of it, and fire it up? I really wanted to use the laptop for this.

The difference between line-level and microphone is that mic input is greatly boosted (+10 or 20 Db or more) which makes a line-out sound really blown out and distorted. Sometimes there's a setting in the audio driver that allows you to run the mic as a line in. Often times, if you've done a clean install of windows, you'll only have the driver itself, and you'll need to get the audio control panel to go with it. You should be able to download that from the laptop manufacturer's site.

There exist extremely cheap USB soundcards that can do in/out.

And by cheap, I mean $7 cheap.