NO SHIPPING on this vintage equipment!
Pick-up only, near Winchester, Virginia. We are about 12 miles from Interstate 81, about 70 miles west of Washington, D.C.Email me for details or to hold equipment.
Unless we have made other arrangements, I will hold items for ONE WEEK pending payment. Please don't ask me to hold an item unless you are seriously interested in it. Thank you--
Now for some fun. Here are some photos taken in my old studio in Hawthorne, Florida. We recorded many good-sounding albums in this studio, for ourselves and others!
Here's a photo of a NASA-surplus Ampex FR100a data transport, which I
converted into a 7-track studio recorder with a sync box and individual Record control
on each channel. The electronics were Ampex tube 350 and 400a units. The high-precision
data heads yielded exceptional frequency response,
which the electronics accomodated with no problem. Noise levels, however, were an issue
on those narrow data tracks.
Before and After: Here's an AG-440 which was burned up in a radio station fire at WDVH, Gainesville, Florida. The station owner kindly gave me the two AG-440 full-tracks which had burned up in the fire.
I discovered that the motors still ran (with new leads)-- pretty impressive engineering. So I cleaned up the metal parts and bolted some old 300 relays onto the 440 control box. I rewired the transport, using a 350 control schematic with tape lifters added, and put the machine into service with 351 electronics and heads:
Here are some snapshots taken my studio in 1986. All of this equipment was fully functional mechanically and electronically, and the Ampexes all had interesting aspects. The 300 at the left in this photo had a direct-drive capstan motor, the one in the center had conventional rim-drive, and the one on the right had a belt-driven capstan. I used the top FR1100 data deck (in the rack at far right) as an echo machine with the 350 electronics channel shown. And my son Christopher is 28 now, and a professional musician!
With the camera looking further to the left, this photo shows two more Ampex 2-tracks, my primary mastering decks at the time, with a rack full of 6 tube limiters:
In the following shot you can see my homebuilt 16-channel board and the 440B 8-track which we did a lot of recording on. The 8-track transport was enclosed in an insulated plywood box for soundproofing, because we recorded with our band playing and singing right in the same room:
Here's another unique recorder, even if it isn't an Ampex. In 1981 I acquired a government-surplus CDC 14-track instrumentation deck and converted it for audio. The cabinet bridge housed the meters, 14 homebuilt preamps, and i/o controls. The record sync panel is at lower left between the two 3.5" chassis housing the CDC electronics. I only wired sync onto the first 8 channels.
The machine worked well and had terrific frequency response characteristics, but it required dbx noise reduction because of the narrow, interleaved tracks:
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