Early 1970s Scotch Dynarange C-120 Audio Tape

I was quite flippant about the performance when I posted a photo of a Scotch Dynarange C-90 in 2012, but it’s often very hard with old tapes to evaluate them properly, since so little is known about the recording conditions, and there’s little or no space to record new sequences for test purposes.

Gladly, however, I’ve now unearthed an early ‘70s Scotch Dynarange C-120 with plenty of blank space on Side B, so I set about establishing what these 40+ year-old stalwarts are like when it comes to preserving a known quality of signal.

Mid 1990s TDK SF 60 Compact Cassette Tape

A lot of people don’t realise that Tape Tardis was set up as a photo blog. As the content progressed, the posts incorporated more and more information, until the site was serving primarily as an information source, which just happened to have some nice pictures.

This post, however,

The Tascam 424 Portastudio

I thought I’d do something a bit different today and take a concise look at an archetypal piece of tape recording equipment. This is a Tascam 424 Portastudio – a multitracking device which gave home recording enthusiasts (often musicians, but sometimes amateur producers) their own small recording studio, in the days before hard disk digital multitracking became available to the masses.