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There is a huge difference between threatening to send a lawyer’s letter and actually proceeding with a successful suit. Eric rightfully strikes the community as a bully because he consistently behaves like one. Frankly, just based on what I’ve seen of Tekton’s design philosophy over the...

How's this for a late response? I have some experience with Crown. Overall I think the transports were less sophisticated than their competitors. If you were a high fi enthusiast they lived at the top end of the spectrum competing with Ampex, maybe Teac or Revox. By the 60's, tape was not...

Reviving an old thread I got around to looking at again. Fun racks there, and very entertaining juxtaposition of technology. Curiously, I have a TC158SD in my system too. My wife found it at a garage sale for 10 bucks and scooped it up to play her old demos. It's a curiosity in my rack now...

I like mine a great deal. The CR1 is extremely focused on its job which makes it particularly good at it. If you know what you're doing, it will give you pretty much the precise set of filters you need for integrating a sub and honestly, there's no truly proper way to do that without having...

It's likely that the inputs of the machine in question are unbalanced as (you may already be aware) this is the standard configuration. On most 5050s, balancing transformers (which were optional but can be retrofitted after purchase) are required to provide balanced inputs. Any 5050 can be...

80 Hz works well although I continue to play with that from time to time. For whatever reason I find that within a range of 60-100 Hz it’s more important that I nail phase and level relationships than what exact crossover knee I select. Apparently you get a fair degree of options for...

I drive my Salon2s with an MC452 at 450 per. This is adequate power but by no means all they will handle and there are times I feel I‘d like more if I wish to preserve all the headroom I feel is desirable. My 24x15x10 room is treated for first reflections, carpeted and just a touch on the...

You may be right but as I only stream Qobuz at home through a dedicated streamer or Audirvana, I wouldn't know and from a strictly selfish point of view, don't care. I find my own way on all the streaming services except Pandora and don't find QB's system any more or less difficult to navigate...

I have Tidal and Qobuz subs and often as not find I prefer the sound streamed over Qobuz although Tidal still sounds good enough for me to enjoy on a full bandwidth system. I can stream and fully unfold MQA with my rig, have two dacs, one MQA licensed, one not and decided I can easily live...

You were the market! I enjoyed my time with them as a learning experience and my time here for the same reason.

Interesting to hear your insight into that. Thanks! I didn't want to say it quite so directly but, yeah, that is a messy layout.:) "Looks like spaghetti to me." To be clearer, I had Poniatoff's adaptation of Telefunken's work and especially, the video recorder in mind. I suppose that could...

Wires on a tape recorder can give you trouble, consider EMI and tape heads and their amps. We probably never heard about many of those sorts of problems since Otaris were generally used professionally, very little hifi penetration for reasons of their cost. An engineer at a radio station or...

All the big boys exhibited modular construction for just about forever. As to which was the "most modular" that's an argument I can't answer, but all pro recorders from the golden era I can think of had modular electronics and typically modular head blocks (stacks) as well. That said, multi...

AFAIK, that's true. Ampex closed the mag tape audio recorder division before Otari stopped making them for series production although Ampex continued to limp along with VTRs and other video gear. Sony bought MCI right around that time as well but dropped their analog product selling only...

Nice looking Ampex. BTW, Brian whose card you have came to Otari from Ampex. Otari stole a number of people from Ampex and the MTR90 was strongly influenced by the ATR100 series of Ampex pro recorders which had an open loop transport. That’s one reason why the MTR series had no pinch roller.

It's fun for me to see your pics as I have mostly just memories from those days. You may recall better than I do but if I actually do recall correctly it was JRF that originally supplied the 8 tr. heads for your recorder. In any event as is clear from your photo, they were proper built...

Several of Otari’s engineers were adept at relapping heads although factory practice was to replace 5050 series heads as required but would relap 8 track (8D) and (curiously perhaps) 5050 mono heads as they were the most expensive single parts on the 8 track units and were constructed with...

The MTR15 was the last of its type and by that time Otari was building them at a different level of performance and tape handling than a 5050 or even machines like the 7300. Different critter. It was hoped by some of us to be open loop (no pinch roller) like the MTR90 but as we see it had a...

@makemine vinyl: Yeah, that’s an early one. The 7300 wasn’t a big seller compared to the large frame recorders that followed but it was durable and robust and pretty easy to work on. I was frequently asked to do studio tours with various Otari Japan personnel especially when the MTR 90 was...

it takes no genius on my part to infer that you dealt with Brian Trankle (minor spelling correction there for you) not me. Or at least you got his card and not mine. I got there just in time to walk the second or third MX7300 through delivery It was sold to Bob Burke Studios in San Francisco...