TEAC CR-310 Communications Recorder, 10 tracks, VHS-based
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- čas přidán 30. 06. 2024
- Here's a whole category of device I never knew existed - a multi-track communications audio recorder that records onto VHS cassettes.
I found this one while browsing eBay; unfortunately it turned up without its keys and without its documentation, but I managed to get it working and have a little play with it.
00:00 - Preamble
05:50 - First Power Up and Look at the Heads
08:40 - Playing a Video Recording
13:20 - Figuring out the Input Connector Pinout
17:47 - First Audio Input Test
21:00 - Test Music Recording
24:41 - Test Speech Recording
27:06 - Conclusion and Wrap-Up - Věda a technologie
![Delco High Performance Radio Receiver! [Repair]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZS3X2Bat8Dw/mqdefault.jpg)
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CZcamsr Techmoan is going to be VERY jealous of you....
This would be right up Matt's alley, indeed!
He reviewed a VHS audio recorder. More of a HiFi one then this
czcams.com/video/WVDCxTtn4OQ/video.htmlsi=PX5A9qk6Z88owdBK
Lol
I recently saw on TV an old Tom Cruise movie "The Firm", in which this unit appeared in a few frames, as part of the equipment used by a firm of mafia lawyers to spy the character played by Cruise. I thought it was a cassette unit but now I see the media used was VHS
Wow! Why, I never!
Never seen one of these before, not in 47 years of audio work. VERY cool.
The quality is similar to music when your are making a call and they put you on hold
that's because... phones have the same bandwidth! (except the HD stuff on VoLTE)
I think it is even worse than phone music.
At RADIO Netherlands, we had these. We use them as logger recorders to record. What was going out on each of the main languages at any particular time so some quality didn’t matter so much.
The CBC in Canada also used to use them as loggers as well as Radio Australia, and the Voice of America and a few other international broadcasters .
Very interesting alternative use case. Didn't realise these were also used as logging recorders. Thank you.
300Hz-3kHz was the frequency range of a POTS phone line
The Alesis ADAT in early 1992, recorded 8 tracks of digital audio onto a VHS tape/cassette.
This is an interesting machine, never seen one before so many thanks for the fascinating video.
128MB magneto-optical carts, those. we used to use them with quantel paintboxes- I may even have one here somewhere. technology was clever & robust, but CDr saw them off.
They look more like the 130mm MO disc's to me (rather than the 90mm 128MB's)
Even if the quality is just enough for spoken word to be understood, 480 hours/20 days (for the higher model) of speech on one tape is certainly massive!
Nice bit of kit and presentation of the capabilities. Never heard of these before!
This is a pretty cool find.
Very unusual use of a VHS tape. The audio quality is still very good for such a super slow tape speed. I can imagine some budget studio multitrack recorder, using same principle, but at higher speed of course.
alesis adat professional digital tape recorders use vhs
@@janetschartzenmeister super VHS tapes
Yeah, it's very interesting! I wonder if it's possible to mod it and somehow increase the speed of the tape (increasing the motor voltage or something?) to make the quality better.
@@janetschartzenmeister yeah, but ADAT wasn't analog like this machine. It recorded digital data onto the tape.
Although it uses VHS tapes, it can't however have the VHS logo on it, mainly because it doesn't comply with the VHS compatibility specs.
Great video! I would still do an "Item Not As Describe" on eBay to force the seller to ship the keys and manual. Still amazed on how slow that tape ran.
Thank you! I did raise a “not as described” case with eBay, but the only option it offered was to return the item for a full refund, and it sent me a return shipping label. Obviously that’s not what I wanted because I still wanted the item, but it was the only possible resolution offered by eBay, so I just had to let it lie.
If you paid via PayPal you could have requested a refund due to non-communication. That will usually light up recalcitrant sellers.
very interesting bit of Kit! thank you 😀
This device was first seen. Although it used VHS tapes, the playback and recording methods were cassette tapes. Because it only recorded 3Khz human voice audio, the sound quality requirements were not high. So he designed to reduce the tape speed to achieve the goal of using a VHS tape to record 10 channels of audio at the same time for a long time (10 heads working at the same time).
The input connector is very much like a 25 pr RJ-21 connector as used in telephony.
Thank you, yes it seems that the 50-pin Centronics (aka Micro Ribbon) connector is known as RJ-21 in telecommunications circles. I wasn't aware of that.
Its a shame Teac didn't develop further in this unit in to like 10 track stereo recorder that could be used as a home studio recording system or even 20 track like you mentioned. instead we had only four or eight track availability. To use at the time video tape was just excellent idea witch was available globally everywhere all sizes and types of it including High end tapes like mastering types.
Tape Speed of the unit could be much higher with different speed variety you could choose from for different quality or tape types. Anyway i just fought to make a point here cos this TEAC seems very interesting little unit that got stuck only to record low quality voice . Thank you for showing and explaining, must say never seen it before 🙂
Yes, I agree, they could have developed this idea into a low-cost multi-track recorder for home studios.
Normally in a VHS player/recorder the read/write head is mounted so that it can scan the tape in a helical way... this machine is recording/reading as a normal cassette player would do; linearly... but we know what already...
And considering it is a multitrack machine it is easy to draw the conclusion that it is capable of recording multiple simultaneous ongoing recordings from a telephone call center...
Good find there. Very interresting item indeed👍
Very interesting! Thanks for that
i do know that technics has a vhs digital audio recorder the sv-p100. this deck is able to record regular audio to the vhs tape like albums and single songs and other audio to it. techmoan did a video of this unit a few years ago. nice deck none the less. first digital recorder made i think.
Hi Tim, very interested device! I notice it requires the 3-hour "T-180" SVHS tape to achieve the full 24-hour recording.
I wanted to contact you about the Sony RTE-3000 realtime Mpeg-1 encoder, but I don't see any contact information on your channel page.
Looks like it would be a great tool to use on vaporwave recordings.
pretty nice! quite weird how loud the mains hum is, even when just monitoring and not recording. in any case, I've subbed!
Thank you. I think grounding the machine via the binding post on the back may have reduced the mains hum, but I forgot that was there while recording the video.
I wonder what 10 days worth of audio books etc I would record on one tape if I had one of those! I would have to round up and connect 10 24 hour players to it, guess you can't record one or two tracks at a time with that erase head.
Yes it’s a pity there is no option to record the tracks independently.
11:40 - 50-pin was quite prevalent in The States back then
I was hoping you would test channel 5 with your audio to see if it was low or came out normal
I feel a Heinbach composition coming out of it.
Can't remember the make but all our dealing room phones where recorded to a VHS system.... until one day when it was ripped out and we had a system you could access from any phone and listen to your calls - even play them on the second handset on loud speaker using the goose mic to the person you were in dispute with...
its actually quite a cool device - likely more sophisticated than the demo. probably it records a pilot tone on each channel (inaudible) that lights the alarm if its not received on the replay head. Also the time search function - perhaps try recording several hours then see if you can recover a particular segment. I used to maintain Racal 32 track recorders at airports - huge machines and huge tapes for the same 24 hour period - we'd have loved something like this!
I plan to have a look at the mechanism and see if I can improve the tape transport, then I can try some of the more advanced features once it's running properly. There will be a "part 2" to this video at some point. If anyone has any technical documentation for these machines, please get in touch.
I worked as a service engineer for Racal Recorders in my youth!😊
I would try to use some Ampex 102 1/2" heads, thicker capstan rod, etc to have at least 3 3/4 ips. This is very sad that tons of VHS will be recycled at a time they could play some analogue music.
Or this will be interesting to speed it x10 up to 4.96cm/s, because these heads seem to be very promising in terms of a gap width. If they are able to record 3kHz at 0.5cm/s than this must be 30kHz at 5 cm/s
I suspect that the sound quality would have been a bit better had S-VHS tapes been available for testing, but an interesting overview.
The CR-500 uses a no longer manufactured Zip Disk 750MB Cartridge.
WOW!!😲
The CR-500 looks like it uses 5.25" Magneto-optical discs, similar to, if not, the same as used on the NeXT computer.
I'd love to speed the tape up to 7.5 ips!
Back in the day when things were built to last.
basically stuff they play when they put you on hold lol
It is almost HIFI, needs more tape speed (20mm/s) making it a 5-track stereo tapedeck.
you know about the akai mg14d that vert like this deck very hard to find
What about a PASC Encoder/Decoder module to let you record in stereo at 20Hz - 22050Khz
The CR500 uses 640 MB rewriteable optical diskettes that look similar to 3.5in floppy but it isn't.
why 10/20 tracks? Wouldn't mono or perhaps 2 tracks be sufficient?
It is useful for recording multiple (phone) conversations simultaneously. Or for radio broadcasters recording their Logs of multiple programs on just one cassette.
I think those were RAM disk in a cartridge or caddy
It might be a pot to turn on the circuit board to change the speed
I cannot help but think that it's supposed to run way better than this :).
Yes, I don't think the mechanism is in the peak of condition. It struggles to rewind the tape as well.
@@timf-tinkering you can literally see the tape wow and flutter while you hear it wow and flutter. It should sound remarkably better, especially when it comes to the stability part. Frequency range will be low not matter what. Honestly a rotating head is just not ideal for analog audio combined with an ultra low tape speed.
@@rollingtroll there is no rotating head in there though, just a normal 22 track wide head stack like you'd find on studio multitracks
I too, think this should sound a LOT better. I remember the VHS machines for professional audio back in the 90s and they sounded WAY better than this. I believe the recordings were digital, though. Is this 100% analog recording to a VHS tape?
@@chad2787 This is analog but that's not the issue. It's running at an extremely low speed, has nothing to do with hifi :). But it's not running consistently.
hi sony mo discs 650mb and up i have alot of them drives are juck all ways going bad and burning out
I've got a beta Hi-Fi which records excellent sound reproduction.
Basically all Hi-Fi VCRs sound excellent, but they record in a very different manner to this recorder - HiFi VCRs move the tape comparatively fast & record audio diagonally across the tape(which is how the video is also recorded), which has the same effect as using more length of tape/recording at a considerably higher speed again. Apparently the effective tape speed of hifi audio on VHS(probably very similar for Beta) is 80 inches per second vs 1/5 of an inch per second as used on this recorder.
Linear mono audio on VCRs is so-so, but still much better than this device as it's seemingly still recorded at about 6x faster than the tape here. I'm not sure what the respective tape width used for each track of audio is with each method though.
Yes, I did initially wonder if the machine would use a helical-scan head like a video recorder, as 20 channels of speech quality audio would no doubt fit comfortably into the bandwidth normally occupied by a video signal, although the track width would have to be very narrow to fit 24 hours onto one tape, but no, the machine uses much simpler linear tracks.
sounds exactly when you get put on hold on the phone probably the worst sound that ever existed in audio
TEAC is kool stuff but this unit is basically a BOAT ANCHOR! Using this outdated audio equipment and tube amps. is like going to an ART show with SUNGLASSES on..
Maybe there is something in it to make the speed go faster try it with the music at faster speed
I can't see any way to select different speeds, and there is no mention of any other speeds in the documentation I was able to find. It may be possible to hack it to run faster, but it seems to be designed as a single-speed machine.
Doubtful. These were designed specifically to record phone conversations. Tape drive was designed for one speed only.
so why not get an SVHS tape to begin with?
Completely useless and obsolete, though beautiful.
The last recordings of a total loooser
Edison wax cylinders sound better. This is terrible.
Looks like device is not in working condition. W&F is extra high and some strange periodic noise frequencies are present. Check PSU output noise with oscilloscope and replace some/all electrolytes in PSU.