That foam insert mentioned at 5:09 was a major disaster for 3M as the glue that held the foam to the reel would degrade over the years and liquify, soaking the tape with what looked like maple syrup. A "reel" mess it was. My understanding at the time was that the foam was an anti-static measure. 3M launched a clean-up with a mobile van and technicians going from TV station to production house across the country cleaning tapes and winding them back to reels that didn't have a foam insert. Lesson learned? If it isn't broke, don't fix it. I maintained 4 VR-2000s and 2 VR-1200s in my early twenties. I remember it being noisy and I kept a daily routine with a TEK 465 scope and a Simpson 260 VOM. Chic magnets for sure. And as I write this I'm getting a little misty eyed.
My first job in Silicon Valley in 1981 was at CMC Technologies. There, we rebuilt quadruplex video heads. I got a job in the VTR gallery where we had literally 'one of each' Quad machine. All the main models of Ampex and RCA. I ended up on the AVR-2 (the Rolls Royce of quads) within 10 days of starting. This pissed off the techs who had been there for years. You worked your way up the hierarchy by your performance. Prior to working there, I had NEVER seen a quad in person. But, had read every scrap of literature there was. Or as I like to call it, the school of OCD! After identifying every machine by sight during the interview, my new boss John Luis (RIP), leaned over to the HR guy and whispers "Hire him!". A note to young people just starting out. If you get a job on a production line, and you are a hot shot, just slow down a bit. Those folks worked for years to get their daily quotas that low. We were required to QA three heads per person per day. By the end of my first week, I was pumping out 8 to 10 heads a day. Management said, if Rich can do ten heads, you guys can do 5 each. Unionized folks can clearly guess what happened next. I was driven out by what is called a "hostile work environment" today. I made no new friends during the entire 90 days I worked there. I would not have been surprised to be met with torches and pitch forks! FUN! It was OK. From there I worked on Videologic Instar motion analyzers. Yep. 90 days. Then took over the video service department at Videomedia in Sunnyvale for 3.5 years. Learned a lot about video gear there! Then on to Sony, Vitalink, Merlin, Visulux, Signal Stream, Fuji Optical Systems, Prime Image, just to name a few of the video companies of the day. Vitalink put all the video conference suites into EDS. Sorry for the ramble. I love video!!!!! The old quad triggered me.
+videolabguy --- haha! We (in Australia) sent our heads over to CMC, and I remember as a kid thinking that with the precision required - that must be some of the most revered soil on earth !
CMC was a cool place for sure. There was line of people who took heads apart. Another line of inspectors who determined if a part was a keeper or trash. Then the video head group who worked ferrite and a nice lady who wound the wire on every video head they made. Another line of people who put the heads back together and balanced them. From there, they went to the VTR gallery. A long dark room with VTRs down both sides, where I worked, Ampex and RCA most models. We aligned the heads against a standard tape. Spin it up. Look at the scope. Shut it down. Tweak, tweak, tweak. Spin it up. Look at the scope. Shut it down. That was my memory of CMC.
I used the RCA TR70 C 30 years ago. It was quite the beast. The one thing I can say about Quad is when picture was optimal and tape was good, it was fantastic. When it was bad, it looked awful. I've seen oxide literally dropping off the tape like fine powder at times and video had banding in it with a head clog. Sound quality was phenomenal. Thanks for posting.
Brilliant video. it's been 15-18 years since I set up a 2" Even though we used Betacam, I was encouraged to "play with the Ampex" as we still used Ampex carts until 99 or 2000.
Remember when we'd get a power interruption. You'd run around like a madman releasing heads on quads before they lost vacuum and the head would slice through the tape. Crazy times!
I noticed you adjusting system phase at 12:07 Shouldn't it be burst phase? We would adjust system phase with an external source punched in E to E with that source being a wipe between the external source and the quad machine punched up through a switcher.
Takes me back to my days at CBS in New York. Most of the VR-2000s had been swapped out for AVR-1s and AVR-3s. Still if you couldn't get a tape to play on an AVR-1 or AVR-3, you stood a pretty good chance of having it play right on a VR-2000.
12:01: The marks on the panel to show you where to turn the knobs for a "quick & dirty" set up. Love it. She might be in a museum now, but once upon a time, she was a workhorse. Thanks for the vid, Phil S! I still work in the industry, and was trying to describe these machines to someone the other night.
I worked at "Reeves Sound Studio" in NYC, on 44st and 2nd ave.... We got a jump on everyone by getting the first 12 VR2000 in NY... This gave us a one year jump on all the Post and TV stations. Because NBC was owned by RCA, they could not buy the VR2000's..... Thus we at Reeves recorded all the shows coming from the Brooklyn NBC studios and we played the shows back on air date... This is how NBC got around RCA... Dave Quam 30 years in post in NYC...Reeves--EUE Screen Gems-Editel--home....
Hi Simon. Pretty much all two inch tapes have been preserved now - in some shape or form. Still loads of other stuff to do though. The Welsh audio collection is a current project. Looks as though you're in Jersey now. Hope things are OK with you. Phil.
Net Nine Austrailia's Los Angeles bureau had TWO of those Ampex Quad machines (PAL version), which were donated to the Ampex Museum in 1990. I remember them clearly... what a pain they were! Now we can make far superior recordings with our cellphones!
From an old time video tape engineer I now wince when I see this video of the operator cleaning the VR2000 tape path without using protective gloves. I believe many in our industry came to premature ends due to Head cleaning solutions we used. Either through skin contact or vapors due to insufficient ventilation. I am not sure why I am still here but for the grace of God.
We used PERC to clean the heads, and it was in a bottle and got all over our fingers when we cleaned the heads. I only used Quads for about 5 years as our main machines for commercials. I hope that I do not get cancer!
We always used to use 'Colclene' TF Just a can of Freon basically. Blame us for the hole in the ozone layer. Worked on these for many years, then later on the C format machines that replaced them.
+mhmrules , every tape change. The first station I worked at in the early 1980s still had one - and still used it! The heads were dying, and sometimes we'd actually have to clean a head clog while the thing was on the air! Videotape room smelled of denatured alcohol 24hrs a day!
2" video tape was never meant to compete with 35mm film and the cost differences were enormous. Most of the stuff recorded on 2" tape had no future value anyway; but yes, good stuff was lost. Rip 1960s Dr Who!
No it's not. The quad video head scans the tape almost vertically from top to bottom, and so the coating on the tape has it's crystals aligned the same way - vertically. This does mean that the audio performance of a quad videotape machine is slightly compromised, but at 15 inches per second, the effect isn't too disastrous. Audio tape is manufactured with the crystals orientated in the direction of travel of the tape. ie - horizontally.
If you had all the mechanical stuff at the top left of the machine working, I wonder if Intel CPU power and sort of USB interface could process all the rest. Would be an even better way of postprocessing really old quad tapes if it was doable.
+MrCrapmatic - probably not too hard After getting the carrier off the tape - then demodulating the video, the 'data rates' weren't all that high. If you guesstimate at 5MHz * Nyquist and a bit = your subpixel rate for digital processing would be around 20 Mbits/sec
Not quite. The tapes weren't thrown out, but the recordings were erased over. It was copies made for international distribution on *FILM* (not videotape) that were thrown out)
Here is an old ORU video showing their tape room with 4 or 5 2" machines (newer type) th-cam.com/video/j0NGJJ-pCa4/w-d-xo.html Thanks for this great demo!
That foam insert mentioned at 5:09 was a major disaster for 3M as the glue that held the foam to the reel would degrade over the years and liquify, soaking the tape with what looked like maple syrup. A "reel" mess it was. My understanding at the time was that the foam was an anti-static measure. 3M launched a clean-up with a mobile van and technicians going from TV station to production house across the country cleaning tapes and winding them back to reels that didn't have a foam insert. Lesson learned? If it isn't broke, don't fix it. I maintained 4 VR-2000s and 2 VR-1200s in my early twenties. I remember it being noisy and I kept a daily routine with a TEK 465 scope and a Simpson 260 VOM. Chic magnets for sure. And as I write this I'm getting a little misty eyed.
My first job in Silicon Valley in 1981 was at CMC Technologies. There, we rebuilt quadruplex video heads. I got a job in the VTR gallery where we had literally 'one of each' Quad machine. All the main models of Ampex and RCA. I ended up on the AVR-2 (the Rolls Royce of quads) within 10 days of starting. This pissed off the techs who had been there for years. You worked your way up the hierarchy by your performance. Prior to working there, I had NEVER seen a quad in person. But, had read every scrap of literature there was. Or as I like to call it, the school of OCD! After identifying every machine by sight during the interview, my new boss John Luis (RIP), leaned over to the HR guy and whispers "Hire him!".
A note to young people just starting out. If you get a job on a production line, and you are a hot shot, just slow down a bit. Those folks worked for years to get their daily quotas that low. We were required to QA three heads per person per day. By the end of my first week, I was pumping out 8 to 10 heads a day. Management said, if Rich can do ten heads, you guys can do 5 each. Unionized folks can clearly guess what happened next. I was driven out by what is called a "hostile work environment" today. I made no new friends during the entire 90 days I worked there. I would not have been surprised to be met with torches and pitch forks! FUN!
It was OK. From there I worked on Videologic Instar motion analyzers. Yep. 90 days. Then took over the video service department at Videomedia in Sunnyvale for 3.5 years. Learned a lot about video gear there! Then on to Sony, Vitalink, Merlin, Visulux, Signal Stream, Fuji Optical Systems, Prime Image, just to name a few of the video companies of the day. Vitalink put all the video conference suites into EDS.
Sorry for the ramble. I love video!!!!! The old quad triggered me.
+videolabguy --- haha! We (in Australia) sent our heads over to CMC, and I remember as a kid thinking that with the precision required - that must be some of the most revered soil on earth !
CMC was a cool place for sure. There was line of people who took heads apart. Another line of inspectors who determined if a part was a keeper or trash. Then the video head group who worked ferrite and a nice lady who wound the wire on every video head they made. Another line of people who put the heads back together and balanced them. From there, they went to the VTR gallery. A long dark room with VTRs down both sides, where I worked, Ampex and RCA most models. We aligned the heads against a standard tape. Spin it up. Look at the scope. Shut it down. Tweak, tweak, tweak. Spin it up. Look at the scope. Shut it down. That was my memory of CMC.
@@videolabguy Can you tell me the wire gage and how many turns for the head rebuild ? Thanks
I used the RCA TR70 C 30 years ago. It was quite the beast. The one thing I can say about Quad is when picture was optimal and tape was good, it was fantastic. When it was bad, it looked awful. I've seen oxide literally dropping off the tape like fine powder at times and video had banding in it with a head clog. Sound quality was phenomenal. Thanks for posting.
Brilliant video. it's been 15-18 years since I set up a 2"
Even though we used Betacam, I was encouraged to "play with the Ampex" as we still used Ampex carts until 99 or 2000.
Thanks for putting this up! I had a 1" Ampex VTR but this one really takes the cake!
That reel of tape is "unbelievable" !
Preservation services ? Tell me more ! I ran these machines for a decade at TVC london. Good to see you Phil !
Wow, what a lot of work to do what we can do with digital recording so easy...we are spoiled and lazy today.
a Masterpiece of engineering. Thanks for showing.
Remember when we'd get a power interruption. You'd run around like a madman releasing heads on quads before they lost vacuum and the head would slice through the tape. Crazy times!
I noticed you adjusting system phase at 12:07 Shouldn't it be burst phase? We would adjust system phase with an external source punched in E to E with that source being a wipe between the external source and the quad machine punched up through a switcher.
Takes me back to my days at CBS in New York. Most of the VR-2000s had been swapped out for AVR-1s and AVR-3s. Still if you couldn't get a tape to play on an AVR-1 or AVR-3, you stood a pretty good chance of having it play right on a VR-2000.
12:01: The marks on the panel to show you where to turn the knobs for a "quick & dirty" set up. Love it. She might be in a museum now, but once upon a time, she was a workhorse. Thanks for the vid, Phil S! I still work in the industry, and was trying to describe these machines to someone the other night.
A well engineered machine. Television stations and production studios were enabled to make real quality recordings.
I worked at "Reeves Sound Studio" in NYC, on 44st and 2nd ave.... We got a jump on everyone by getting the first 12 VR2000 in NY... This gave us a one year jump on all the Post and TV stations. Because NBC was owned by RCA, they could not buy the VR2000's..... Thus we at Reeves recorded all the shows coming from the Brooklyn NBC studios and we played the shows back on air date... This is how NBC got around RCA... Dave Quam 30 years in post in NYC...Reeves--EUE Screen Gems-Editel--home....
Hi Simon. Pretty much all two inch tapes have been preserved now - in some shape or form. Still loads of other stuff to do though. The Welsh audio collection is a current project.
Looks as though you're in Jersey now. Hope things are OK with you. Phil.
That brings back loads of memories ... spent many hours maintaning those when I was in VT Maintenance at Pebble Mill ...
Net Nine Austrailia's Los Angeles bureau had TWO of those Ampex Quad machines (PAL version), which were donated to the Ampex Museum in 1990. I remember them clearly... what a pain they were! Now we can make far superior recordings with our cellphones!
Great explanation of this technology, thank you!
wish I was born 40 years earlier!
That bloke is seriously well into it, quads are obviously his babies. It takes all sorts.
Do these machines still exist in the UK? I'd love to see one again.
From an old time video tape engineer I now wince when I see this video of the operator cleaning the VR2000 tape path without using protective gloves. I believe many in our industry came to premature ends due to Head cleaning solutions we used. Either through skin contact or vapors due to insufficient ventilation. I am not sure why I am still here but for the grace of God.
We used PERC to clean the heads, and it was in a bottle and got all over our fingers when we cleaned the heads. I only used Quads for about 5 years as our main machines for commercials. I hope that I do not get cancer!
Seems like a simple alcohol solution ought to be enough. What was so dangerous about the cleaning solutions you used?
We always used to use 'Colclene' TF Just a can of Freon basically. Blame us for the hole in the ozone layer. Worked on these for many years, then later on the C format machines that replaced them.
Hope this takes off as I never liked VHS.
Wow. That is fascinating stuff. We don't know how lucky we are with all these modern digital video formats - you JUST press 'Play' and that's it.....
What a nightmare to work on this machines back on the day... I thought reel to reel sound recording was difficult and cumbursome.
Now, is the cleaning process have to be performed before EVERY tape playback, or is it done at the beginning of the day?
+mhmrules , every tape change. The first station I worked at in the early 1980s still had one - and still used it! The heads were dying, and sometimes we'd actually have to clean a head clog while the thing was on the air! Videotape room smelled of denatured alcohol 24hrs a day!
What was that rule? Never use recording tape with an X in the brand name.... ;)
@@DandyDon1 Or a "Scotch", unless you like wearing your video heads out early!
This is mind-blowing!
Väcker viss nostalgi :-)1964 - 1965
Damn a GIANT VCR
Excellent tutorial, mate! Even tho the quads were very manually operated, I've always liked them.
Great Video..Brings back memories!
Stop saying tip penetration. You’re making me nervous.
I'm interested about the video/audio offset. Why wasn't a delay line installed to compensate?
The tape went 15 IPS and the audio head was 9 inches after the video head 3/4 sec
The audio was offset when recording, so when it is played back, everything will line up.
35mm film much better quality than 2" videotape and can't be wiped, the latter coming back to haunt the TV companies decades later
2" video tape was never meant to compete with 35mm film and the cost differences were enormous. Most of the stuff recorded on 2" tape had no future value anyway; but yes, good stuff was lost. Rip 1960s Dr Who!
Just think if we had to do that to our AD converters every time. We got it easy.
Hello Friend
Is this video tape really 2 inch audio?
No it's not.
The quad video head scans the tape almost vertically from top to bottom, and so the coating on the tape has it's crystals aligned the same way - vertically.
This does mean that the audio performance of a quad videotape machine is slightly compromised, but at 15 inches per second, the effect isn't too disastrous.
Audio tape is manufactured with the crystals orientated in the direction of travel of the tape. ie - horizontally.
@@Saprophitic thank you clarification friend
You can see from the close up that the audio head only occupies the top bit of the stack.
If you had all the mechanical stuff at the top left of the machine working, I wonder if Intel CPU power and sort of USB interface could process all the rest. Would be an even better way of postprocessing really old quad tapes if it was doable.
+MrCrapmatic - probably not too hard
After getting the carrier off the tape - then demodulating the video, the 'data rates' weren't all that high. If you guesstimate at 5MHz * Nyquist and a bit = your subpixel rate for digital processing would be around 20 Mbits/sec
Nice. So these were the tapes thrown out by the BBC.
Not quite. The tapes weren't thrown out, but the recordings were erased over.
It was copies made for international distribution on *FILM* (not videotape) that were thrown out)
Have you got Inter Sinc section ?
David Marek Intersync was the servo system that let the machine lock to external reference... and yes, that machine has it.
Fascinating.
damn, this guy is hot!
Einstein is handy with that old machine out there
Here is an old ORU video showing their tape room with 4 or 5 2" machines (newer type)
th-cam.com/video/j0NGJJ-pCa4/w-d-xo.html
Thanks for this great demo!
A piece of cake. Er, no!