7412533052

WHERE THERFS A FINE TAPE

RECORDER there's

notę to

owners

To insure optimum recording ąuality with your excellent machinę, the recommended tape is irish *211.. and for uninterrupted recording, irish *724 with its 6 Ib. tensile strength gives you one fuli hour at l^l/2 i.p.s. Send for technical bulletin.

ORR INDUSTRIES INC.

Opelika, Alabama

GIM ICKS WITH

i o

monounci rr    wttoo

• i H

SPEAKERS

Just solid, sensible acoustic engineer-ing. Nothing fancy but the performance. That*s the Wigo story, short but sweet. For literaturę, write ...

united

®)udio

PRODUCTS O F OISTINCTION

202-4 Enst I9th St..N. Y.3, N. Y.

“My last wish? Shoot me with JENSEN NEEDLES.”

chines will probably take prccedence. Hcreafter, in reviewing 4-channel tapes, I will indicate whether they were reviewed on the big top Bystcm or on lesser equipment or both.

A notę in passing about magnetic tape head gaps. Some people are evi-dently getting a little confused on some aspects of this mat ter. Now, as Ampex and some others have shown in their latest designs, the closer to-gether you can bring the walls of the gap in the head without actually touching each other, the morę paral-lel to each other these walls can be, and the smoother the edges of the gap walls can be . . . the morę extended will be your frequency response . . . naturally coupled with the appropriate circuitry. BUT . . . even if you gain with this ultra-tiny gap, if then you reduce the over-all area of the gap by going, for example, from a full-track tape to a half-track tape (or I should say tape heads) you will impair the signal-to-noise ratio. So with 4-channel tape. even though the gap itself be smali, by cutting the area down again (by, in essence, cutting a half-track head in half again) you run into this same signal-to-noise problem. Am-pex and others have done much work in reducing these deleterious effects, but there remains some residual prob-lems to be licked. Actually we should wait another six months before we evaluate anything as new as these heads and the 4-channel tape. By that time production problems will have been overcome and we can assume that the product we will be receiving represents the best the industry can do at this time and at the present state of the art.

TABOO

LEGEND OF PELE Arthur Lyman and Orchestra. Hi-Fi ta|H*8 K806 and K813 combined on 4-track stereo.

This is a collection described as “ex-otic sounds.” Actually these are rather florid imitations of South Sea and Hawaiian songs and chants. There has been extensive use of many unusual percussion instruments and, in my humble opinion, the whole thing is an amalgam of flapdoodle. How-ever there are undoubtedly many who like this sort of thing (the albums have been best sellers) and from a strictly sound viewpoint they may find many devo-tees.

On the big system, cross-channel modulation is less evident here than in most of the other 4-channel tapes I’ve tried, most probably because the musie was recorded at a very high level. Or-dinarily this, in itself. might give rise to cross-channel noise, but it was nec-essary to reduce the over-all gain of the system therefore bringing down this noise considerably. The sound was reasonably clean, but I found the very boomy bass objectionable, which is a personal reaction—I admit.

On the smali system, the tape be-haved nicely and the bass response probably madę up for some speaker deficiency in this respect (which is

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