The electronicsI had never designed a low-noise pre-amp before.And please be sure and read to the end for your chance to vote for your favorite Tech Rap.Image from Pinterest.com In 1964, fifty-six years ago this month, the same year The Beatles invaded America, Philips introduced the US to the recordable cassette tape (trademarked under the name Compact Cassette).
Though the new plastic fantastic invention was intended for dictation, two years later, prerecorded music tapes hit the market. For the audio enthusiast, the cassettes size proved much more convenient than 7 diameter reel-to-reel tapes, 12 records, and 8 tracks, with the ability to easily slip a tape in ones shirt or pant pocket. Margrave manor 2 the lost ship v10 rip pcPre-recorded reel to reel music tapes were harder to source and the playback machines were expensive, heavy, and required considerably more real estate. Records had been the dominant format, and according to vintagecasettes.com, it took a good twenty years until cassettes finally outsold their vinyl counterparts. The Advent Model 201 The revolutionary Advent Model 201 home cassette deck (sans its tinted dust cover). Photo from quadraphonicquad.com. One consumer electronics product to give the fledgling cassette format a shot in the arm was the Model 200 from 1971 which retailed for 260 and was made in Massachusetts by Advent Corp. Advent was founded in Cambridge by Henry Kloss in 1967 and built high-quality loudspeakers. Advent was also the first company to produce a projection television long before home theater ever became part of our lexicon. But I digress. The Model 200 tape deck used a top-loading Nakamichi transport (before Nakamichi started building decks under their own name) that proved unreliable. The 200 was replaced by the Model 201 which used an industrial-strength, commercial-grade 3M Wollensak transport. It had an analog tape counter, a generously-sized analog VU meter, a single rewindfast forward lever, a removable dust cover, and was housed in real a wood case. These were not the first consumer home tape decks, but the Advent models were the very first high-fidelity home decks to include patented Dolby B noise reduction for recording and playback (reducing tape hiss by 9dB) and CrO2 (chrome) tape support. The importance of the Model 201 to the evolution of recorded music cannot be overstated. From the Model 201s original user manual: the 201 incorporates more than the usual number of user-accessible adjustments to permit the serious recordist to achieve the recording quality, that, just a short time ago, was thought possible only with the best and most expensive open reel recorder. Peter Skiera and Bruce Gregory (right) at Como Audio in 2019. My friend and former colleague, Bruce Gregory, was a young engineer at Advent Corp. I spoke with Gregory by phone and asked him about that project: PS: Advent was your first major engineering gig BG: Yeah. So, they hired me to see if I could straighten it out, which I did. Then we did the Model 101 Dolby which was either record or playback but not both. Advents outboard Advocate Model 101 Dolby Noise Reduction Unit. Photo from eBay. PS: What can you tell me about the design of the Model 201 Was it difficult BG: Well, okay, for me, it was hard.
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