Reel to Reel Magic!

This week a DJ friend sent me some reels of tape recorded “liners” from a show she did for an upstate radio station she did in the 90s. She asked if I had a way of digitizing them so she could use them on her current show. Thanks to an engineering buddy, I inherited an Otari MX-5050 reel to reel tape machine when it was retired from the production room of a local FM station several years ago. I was all too happy to save it from the scrap heap.

For a fleeting moment, as I reached over to push the power button I held my breath since the machine had not been powered up for several months. But all I heard in my studio monitors was a satisfying “thump” as the machine came to life once more. After all, this puppy is pretty old; they started to appear in radio and television stations in the mid 1980s. They made them pretty good back 35 years ago!

When I opened the box the tape was in I was gratified to see that the person who put the tape in the box was a professional who made sure the audio tape was smoothly wound on the reel and the end was carefully taped to the face of the reel with a short strip of splicing tape. I was also happy that the audio tape itself was of high quality and in excellent shape. When my friend speculated if the tape would hold together for the dubbing, I joked that it only had to do that one time. I needn’t have worried. This tape will hold together for more than one pass across the heads.

So I placed the 5“ reel of tape on the left spindle of the Otari and since I didn’t have an empty 5” reel to place on the right spindle, I left the 10” aluminum AFGA reel that was already on the take up spindle. I wasn’t worried about the mismatch in the reel sizes as I knew the Otari could manage that easily.

The next two things that happened, however, were unexpected.

The first thing was the richness of the sound that was on the tape. It was obviously recorded on a professional grade machine by an operator who knew what he was doing.

The second thing in retrospect I should have thought of but didn’t; the recording was in mono and recorded on a half track machine.

A quick look at the label on the tape box explained both of these phenomena. First the quality, the person who did the recording was Billy Powell, no not the pianist for the Lynyrd Skynyrd band, but the well known and loved upstate South Carolina radio personality and voice talent. It was recorded at Leslie Advertising in Greenville where my old WUSC buddy Steve Green was senior vice president and director of media services at the time. Second, the reason it was in mono was that it was recorded for use on WLBG-AM that is still on the air at 860 KC in Laurens, SC.

So I quickly re-patched the machine and set Audicity for mono recording and restarted the tape. I then sat back in my studio chair and marveled at the rich tonal quality of something recorded over 25 years ago. It took me back, way back. This tape sounded much better than some of my old air checks recorded on a studio “Maggie” in the 60s or on an Ampex AG440 in the 70s. Mind you, I am not knocking either of those machines, but there were some neat advances in tape technology that came along since those machines were in their heyday. I don’t know what machine up at Leslie Billy used to record the liners but it clearly was a top quality well maintained recorder.

All I could do was sit back with my eyes closed and think; “This is REAL radio!” No, this is not WABC in New York, CKLW in Windsor, Canada, or even KRLA or KHG in Los Angeles. This was medium to small market AM radio which was the hometown “go-to” spot on the dial that was the “social media” of the day. Images of the control rooms in my past flashed across my memory, aided by the slight smell of chromium oxide that drifted across the studio from the machine as the tape slid across the heads. I saw the big 16 inch RCA transcription turntable forever spinning at 45 RPM by that big old electric motor mounted in the console below at WCOS, the late afternoon sunlight drifting past the 4’ by 8’ glass windows of the remote studio at Doug Broome’s on Two Notch Road, the three 440’ towers in the field outside the picture window in the back of the studio at WIS radio and that iconic swimming pool at WAPE out the side window and through the glass in front of the board. To be completely honest, I never worked for the Big Ape, but I did get a chance to sit at that iconic Brennan console.

I even felt the warmth of the sunlight on my neck and back in the WUSC-FM control room on a cool winter’s day. That was just last week! Yes, this was real radio.

At my age, there are a great number of memories. So many that you don’t get a chance to remember something specific until something like digitizing an old tape triggers it. Thank you Billy, Ed and Cassie for another pleasant memory. Oh MY!