Teac V-80

[Queila Neubecker]

Themanual is incorrect. As someone who has owned two of those machines over the years, I can assure you it weighs significantly more than 17 lb. In fact, my guess is that it's a typo, and they meant to say 71 lb, but reversed the numbers.

My initial thought (from memory, and it's been a while) when I saw the question was 70-80 lb. They're big, heavy tanks. That 71-72 lb estimate seems about right to me; I'd say "close enough" for estimating the total weight (as Dak said, you'll need to add the weight of the crate / packing materials to the total "shipping weight") and shipping costs - it won't be inexpensive to ship unfortunately.

If you pull the rack rails or wooden side panels off, you might save yourself several ounces / a couple pounds, but it's probably not going to make a huge difference. The metal frame and the motors are where the weight is in that machine, and there's really no getting around that. Just make sure you have the front of it well protected and "spaced" if you do pack it for shipping. You want to protect those reel tables, heads and tape guides, and not have all that weight pressing on them.

What needs to be done to her? Are you having a total refurbishment done, or just alignment / calibration? I always worry about having alignment done remotely - it's too easy for the thing to get knocked around in shipping and thrown off IMO. It doesn't always happen, but it can. Good packing and careful transport are the keys.

The 80-8, along with the follow-up deck (the Model 38) are both three-head machines, which makes the process of alignment and calibration MUCH easier than the later two-head machines like the TSR-8 and MSR-16. I'd recommend you get yourself a calibration / test tape and a copy of the service manual (linked to above) and pay someone to come to you and teach you how to do it yourself. It's a bit of a PITB, but not really THAT hard to do. That's a good machine to learn how to do it on, and you're going to need to do it every so often anyway - this way, you can save some money AND rest assured that you can set it up yourself to get the best possible performance out of the machine.

Even if you don't plan on ever working on it yourself, give some thought to your tape choices now, so you can tell the tech what you plan on using with it. The 80-8 was designed to use Ampex (Quantegy) 456, with a 0 VU record level calibration of +3dB over 185 nWb/m. I used to run mine at +6dB; I don't recall if they can go up to +9dB for optimal use with high-output tape (3M 996 / Ampex 499), but if I had my 'druthers, that's the tape I'd want to run - assuming you can get your hands on it in quantity and you can calibrate the machine to take advantage of it. 996 (later known as Quantegy GP9 - same formula) is just wonderful tape. You can slam the snot out of it and it just gets better and better. Earlier stuff could be a bit brittle physically (996) and would break occasionally if the deck's transport was too abusive, but I liked it better than 499, which seemed to shed a lot of oxide...

I loved my Tascam 38. I did spend a lot of time working on it towards the end, mostly replacing those little reed relays they used every where. I even drilled a small hole in the bottom of the case so I could spray in cold spray or tap with a plastic rod if it crapped out during a session. The reel tables started needing frequent tightening too, and eventually all the rubber needed replacing.

70-80 pounds would be very close. Here's my old 80-8 setup, used for studio and on location projects and I loved it in it's day. I even had "custom built stands" for the 80-8 and Teac 7300 half track.

I ran those too... I tried running 80-8's sans NR a few times, but it was just too noisy for my tastes. The dbx was kind of a pitb to set up and calibrate, and a lot of people seemed to have trouble with it in general... but you know, back then, that 30dB of dbx noise reduction made a big difference. And I must have been lucky, because I generally didn't have a lot of problems with them going out. Playing tapes from somewhere else though was always a bit of a crap shoot. Based on some of the DAW tracks I've seen, things haven't changed all that much in that regard. I never used the 7300 on a regular basis, but there was a shop near here in Upland in the 70s called Suntronics, and Ron, the guy who ran it, was a big fan of those. How did you like yours?

Guys, can you both please tell us more about your boards and studios in those pics? What kind of stuff were you working on, and what was a typical (or memorable) session like? What sort of outboard stuff were you using with those rigs? Monitors?

The sad thing is that most of the old decks sit unused. The 80-8 is capable of some pretty darned nice recordings in capable hands; it's no Studer, but even the big 2" tape decks sit unused in the hallways of most major studios, and they sell for a fraction of what they once cost. Even fairly nice workhorse decks like Dak's Otari are often tossed out or given away by production rooms, radio stations and college media labs - or on Craigslist. They were built like tanks, so there's still a lot of them out there, but very few people are really using them.

I think we should make all recording students start out on old tape decks and small mixers. They should learn to clean and service them and learn to record the way we (or at least I) had to - by bouncing stuff back and forth between two tape decks, messing around with sound-on-sound, and bouncing internally on those narrow format, low track count multitracks.

I say that largely in jest, but I really think there's some positive aspects to starting out like that. You learn about signal to noise that way, and how to optimize it. You have to think out the production in advance, including any bouncing and pre-mixing, because once you're committed and wipe (or start recording over) the source tracks, there is no going back - unless you want to start over. You learn the importance of arrangement - even with bouncing, you have relatively limited tracks available and you learn what is important and what is frivolous, and how to make the most of the tracks you have... there's a TON of classic recording experience and knowledge to be had by learning to use one of these old machines well, and some cool semi lo-fi, old-school analog sounds available on the cheap for experienced engineers who are willing to put in the effort involved to care for and feed the old beasts.

A DX-8 I was using and bought it when I bought the machine new, fairly soon after it was released. I picked it up on Dec.31 and had my first session on Jan 1, a new year. I should put the material from the first session on the net somewhere, maybe my site eventually. I loved the 7300 and, I believe, I still have it around here somewhere, either at my house or another house that I have on the market here. Wanna buy a house? The board I started using was built locally and had 12 big rotary knobs in place of linear faders. I got to be very creative with it since it had no faders. I would split a signal on the patch bay and use the spit at the patchbay to feed two rotary faders, assigning each fader to a different "side" to create "pans". Eventually that board was replaced with the one in the picture, a custom built console from (can't recall the maker) Memphis. You know of them though (maybe Auditronics). The studio was actually owned by an electronics school. I bought the tape machines, they bought the mixing console. They flew me to Memphis to inspect the mixer before they bought it. I taught the studio non classroom portions. I got no pay, but traded teaching time for studio time and did ok. I got hired away from myself by my local equipment supplier (AVC Systems, Inc., Minneapolis) and had to leave the studio business so I wouldn't compete with prospective customers. My old 4 track, 3340, and Model 2 Teac were purchase from me by Jimmy Jam Harris and Terry Lewis. They were FLAT broke and playing in a local band just before "The Time" was put together and they went nuts and were very successful. Here's what I started out with at school:

Those pics were actually taken by the local newspaper in 1983, Bryan / College Station TX. My partner and I, both local musicians and avid recordists decided maybe we could make some beer money setting up a small recording studio since there wasn't one in town. We started with just the gear we had on hand rather than borrow money to buy better stuff and maybe fall flat on our faces.

The gear in the pic is a Tascam 38 reel to reel 8 track, a Teac two track (not a half track yet), a Sunn 2212 (?) mixer for incoming and a little Teac mixer for cueing. Needless to say our patch bay got a workout with these two "consoles" not exactly designed for recording. The rack held some fairly simple stuff (varying frequently), at times including a Tascam spring 'verb, four channels of 4 band fully parametric EQ to supplement the console's very basic EQ, an ancient MXR harmonizer (which we used mostly to try harmonies before having someone actually sing them), a Fostex stereo linked compressor / limiter, two Rane 31 band EQs and probably a few other things I've long forgotten. I know my partner had some overly large chorus rack thingy that he loved entirely too much, not sure if it ever got in the rack.

We found ourselves immediately making money, not so much from local musicians as from local businesses that wanted ad jingles. In the days we'd do jingles, in the evenings we'd record local bands and / or hunt them down at gigs trying to get the money they owed us.

We hired a salesperson and a full time songwriter / keyboardist to help with the jingles, and we had a full Rolodex of session players, most of whom were sort of indentured servants trying to pay off their band recording debt or earn enough TO record their bands (after we got smart and didn't let bands run up big bills).

One night some band didn't show and we were having a few beers brainstorming more services for the studio to provide. Somehow we came up with the idea of putting out two albums, the tracks coming from bands who'd be selected in a contest. We'd charge a small entry fee to keep down the number of tapes we'd have to listen to and select 8-10 winners to be recorded for free in our slack time. My partner Kevin came up with the idea of donating some of the proceeds to charity, and enlisting the local JC's and newspaper to promote and sell it. We specified that recording quality on the entries would be disregarded as much as possible, but we also figured that since we were the only studio in town probably a lot of folks would pay us to record them, and we'd get a lot of new clients who didn't know we existed.

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