Episode: 2844
Title: HPR2844: The Sony TC-222-A Portable Reel-To-Reel Tape Recorder
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2844/hpr2844.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:52:40

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This is HBR episode 2844 entitled The Sony DC 220 to a portable real tape recorder.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 31 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, I talk about my latest rift or gadget, an 1969 Sony portable real tape recorder.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An honest host.com.
Hey everybody, this is John Culp and left yet Louisiana and it's been a while since I recorded
an episode but it's summertime now so I've got a little bit of time and so I wanted to record
an episode about a new toy that I have. I don't have it in front of me right now. I will
later record this in two parts at least maybe even more than that but the the new toy I have is
related to something that I recorded about earlier. There was an episode about my Pioneer RT 707
real to real tape deck and this episode is going to be about a new real to real tape machine that I got
at the thrift store not too long ago. It is a Sony TC 222A portable real to real tape recorder
and I've had it for at least a month now maybe a little bit longer but I haven't recorded
about it yet because I was hoping I'd be able to record at least some audio on the machine
itself but the record function's not working and I don't really know what's up with that but I'll
talk more about the machine later. I'm maybe in doing things a little bit out of order here but this
is just kind of how I'm thinking today. I watched an episode of there's a guy on YouTube that I
really like called Techmone and he goes and looks at legacy audio equipment all kinds of outdated audio
formats and video formats and stuff like that and the episode I watched today was about
four hours of music onto a single cassette for one of those background music type machines that
they used to play in stores. I mean nowadays you could just start a playlist or use Pandora or
something like that and just have all the music you want going on indefinitely but back in the day
you'd have to have some kind of pre-recorded sound and he's had a few episodes about different
pre-recorded background music machines that I mean some of them are really crazy. There's this one
with a gigantic cassette that I mean the cassette is probably like eight by 10 inches or something
and it held something like 23 hours of music in one continuous tape loop and then he did one about a
record changer that held about a dozen records and played both sides of the record at about 16
revolutions per minute so it got a lot of sound on it that way. The machine that he looked at today
was a cassette tape machine that played the tape at a slightly slower speed maybe 75% of the normal
speed but also instead of doing recording both directions on the cassette in stereo it recorded
four separate selections of music or four separate music tracks one on each of the four channels
so there are two channels going one direction and two going the other and this thing
recorded audio separate audio tracks on each of the four channels and this player would only play
one of those channels at a time instead of playing in stereo so anyway you'd get a lot more music on
the tape. Well this I say all this to set up what I'm about to do here this got me to thinking of how
I could put a lot of music onto a fairly small tape reel because the portable reel to reel tape
player that I got it uses five inch tape reels which don't hold as much tape as a seven inch reel
and so theoretically you can't put as much music on them however it does have two speeds on the tape
there is a what three and a quarter three and three quarters inches per second speed and then I
guess a one and what would it be one and something a one and seven eight inches per second I think it's
one and seven eight inches per second anyway it's much slower and I guess the idea was these
machines were used for dictation probably but mostly recording spoken word because the audio
quality is not great is I mean this is not something that you would want to play really good music
good musical recordings back on for the pleasure of listening to them it was probably a dictation
machine used in offices and so forth and maybe it was used during I don't know something like the
Vietnam War where soldiers over in Vietnam would record audio messages and send them back home
to their family on these smaller reels well you can record at that really slow speed and get a lot
more time that way however the large tape deck that I have only has one of those speeds it has the
three and a half inches per three points I forget what it is I'm sorry it's like three three
and three quarters inches per second it has that speed and then it's got a faster speed seven
and a half inches per second or 19 centimeters per second and 11 centimeters per second I believe
are the indications given on the machine and the higher speed you record the better quality but the
less time that you can get well I had the idea to record some music at four times it's normal speed
onto a real to real tape recording on my RT707 at the seven and a half inches per second speed
and then playing that same tape on the portable real to real tape deck at the one and seven eights
inches per second speed which is a fourth of the original speed and that way I could get quite a
lot of music onto a small real of tape so anyway I think I did the math right but I'm gonna walk
through a couple of the steps to to get there right now so the music I'm going to use
should warm Ken Fallon's heart it is a public domain music the open Goldberg variations and the
open well-tempered Clevver recorded beautifully by Kamiko Ishizaka and this is music I featured
in an earlier episode the one about the fugue it was recorded with a crowdfunding and immediately
released in the public domain so I can use this music however I want including right now to
demonstrate this so what I needed to do first of all was to get the music into a high speed
format and there's a couple of little barriers to overcome so the the well-tempered Clevver is
48 separate audio tracks each of which is between I don't know one minute and five minutes
and what I need to do to make this easier is I want to speed all of those up but I also want to
put them all into one giant audio track and so I can actually do this from the command line
I've done the combination of audio tracks you know multiple tracks into one before using just
a simple cat command CAT the the thing that you use to combine text files and whatnot it can
also be used to combine audio files you just type the command cat and then a space and then whatever
files you want to combine and then give it the greater than sign to redirect all of the output
into a new file and you give it the new file name however first what I want to do is speed up
all of these things and I'm going to do that by using the SOX command SOX it calls itself the Swiss
Army Knife of audio editing and so the the command in SOX is you type SOX space and then the input
file and then the name of the output file and then if what you're doing is changing speed you type
the word speed and then a space and then you tell it the factor by which you want to change the
speed so in this case I'm making it four times faster so my command would be SOX space input file
space output file space speed space and then 4.0 now I've got 48 files to do this on so not surprisingly
I wrote a little script that loops through them all and does them one at a time lickety split so
this is a for loop so I say for i in asterisk.mp3 semicolon do and then on a new line I give it
some sanity checks in file equals base name of dollar sign i I'll put this in the show notes so
that you can just look at it and then I strip off the mp3 to give the the stem of the file name
and then the output file is the stem of the file name followed by an underscore and then 4x
indicating that it's four times the original speed and then the last line of the commands in the
for loop is SOX space dollar sign in file space dollar sign out file space speed space 4.0
and then I give it a sleep 4.1 seconds command just to kind of keep it from tripping over itself
all right so I've already tried this on the open goldberg variations and it worked perfectly so
now I'm going to do it on the open well tempered clavier I'm going to run the script so period slash
4x auto complete and I've I've cd into the directory where all the files are and I press enter
and I'm going to let it go it's fun listening to a command work isn't it um I should say that I
look I I already recorded the entire open um the open art a few by JS Bach also recorded by
Komiko Ishizaka onto a five inch reel and when I played it back on the tape deck it it started
having funny sound issues about four or five minutes in and I'm not really sure why because when I
played it back on my my nice tape deck with my big stereo it sounded beautiful and so I'm not
really sure what the issue is we'll see if that happens again with this there are a couple of
ways that I could go about getting this four times speed audio onto the real tape I was thinking
I would just burn these two big tracks to an audio cd and then play the cd in my cd player I could
also I guess I could play it straight from the laptop into the stereo as a source and then
record from there I'm not sure exactly what's going to be best but the stereo is already set up
for the cd to record to the tape deck so maybe that's the easiest thing to do okay it's finished
and there they all are I just did a list command and see for every single one of the original
files there is now a four x file let's listen to see what this sounds like so here's what the
original prelude number three and c chart major sounds like it's all it's a pretty fast piece
anyway it might even it might sound to you like this is four times speed even at its regular speed
let's see this doesn't sound very good coming out of these little computer speakers
okay and then the few that goes with it sounds like this
do
lovely okay now let's find this and open up let's open up the same pieces at four times speed
here I go I've select them right click open with blc
so that's the prelude
actually that might be the few here's the here's the prelude
okay that is really fast now here's the few again
so if you're actually listening to this podcast at like one point seven times speed the way I do
that's it's going to be practically inaudible anyway so I've got the files ready now and what I'll do
before I record the rest of this is I will burn them to a CD and then I will transfer them to a
five inch audio tape reel and when I come back I will play the tape from that reel in the
console like in my audio rack tape deck and then I'll take that same tape and put it on my portable
reel to reel tape deck and play it at the very slow speed which should bring it right back to its
normal speed okay we'll see if this works like geeking out on audio stuff that has no practical
value at all but it's kind of fun to do of course that's the kind of thing that hackers are known for
all right y'all I will come back with more in just a bit
okay all I'm back now I'm at my house and the so-called reading room in my house I'm sorry you
might hear a little bit of air conditioner noise because the air conditioner is on but hopefully
it won't be too bad so I've got now both of the real real tape players in the same room
the and I'll talk about the little one first so I bought this I found this tape machine this
again is a Sony TC 222A reel to reel tape recorder TC stands for tape quarter
it is about 14 inches square about five inches thick ways about five or six pounds I guess it uses
five inch reels it's got an enclosure thing that has a plastic window in it so you can see the
reels spinning around I will put some pictures in a flicker album and I'll probably link to a
YouTube video or two showing the thing in action I bought it on May 24th for five dollars at
a hand up thrift store in Lafayette and when I got it I really had no way to test it to see if
it was working because it did not have a power cord and I did not have any batteries it will run
on four diesel batteries but I didn't have any at the time but I remember the very next morning
I ran out to the hardware store and got some batteries and I put them in the machine and when I
tried to turn it on I got a little bit of response the there was movement in the heads
so when I turned it to the play position the take up reel had started moving
and so I put a tape on there I had one five inch tape my brother's tape from one
wear kids it was full of jazz music and he had and I have that tape now so I had one tape
that would fit the thing it did come with a take up reel so I had a five inch tape and a take
up reel and I put the tape in there and it moved but there was no sound so the tape was rolling
no sound volume didn't do anything rewind worked but fast forward did not work
and so I did what any hacker would do when something doesn't work I took the cover off and
just took a look in there and it looked okay I decided to just start first of all I don't think
I'd ever really looked inside of a real to real tape deck it's pretty cool there's all kinds of
linkages and moving parts and you know you move one thing and it triggers a whole chain
reaction of parts moving around and there's spinning wheel idler wheels take up wheels all kinds of
cool stuff it had both belts in place and they were in decent condition considering how old the
thing was the tape counter it worked that's something that did not work on my pioneer when I first
got it the tape counter belt was broken on that one but the tape counter belt was in place on
this one and working just fine although I did order a new pair of belts and replace them just
because and it actually wasn't that hard to get at the access points for the belts to replace them
either so what I did to try to get sound was I sprayed contact cleaner on all the contact
electrical contact points I could find and voila next time I tried to push play I heard sound
so playback started working the next order of business was to try to fashion a power cable
I could see from the place where you plug in the power cord that it looked very similar to the
power cords like the charging cords for an old electric razor and so I dug around in my spare
parts bin and found a spare power cord for an old electric razor that's long since died
and it didn't fit in the hole but I got out my sander and a little hacksaw and I sanded and
sawed until I finally got the thing to fit and when I plugged it in there it powered the machine so
now I have a power cord for it it looks a little funny because it's not a usual power cord but
it works just fine so that was good let's see what else I cleaned the contact points for place the
belts I made a power cord I discovered that the fast forward was not working because the fast
forward idler wheel did not turn it was frozen so I managed to get that off clean it out lubed it
put it back in place where it spun freely and then of course fast forward worked perfectly from
then on the record mechanism was having trouble like you pushed the little red record lever to the
left and it's supposed to stay there when you you push that to the left and then push the
control knob to the play position at the same time and it's supposed to lock in and start recording
well it wouldn't do that and I took off the back cover and found that the record linkage was loose
the the screw needed to be turned down about two or three turns and once I did that the record
linkage worked just fine it still doesn't really record I mean it records something because when
I start recording then I start missing with the record level it will actually record the sound
of the static that the thing makes but it won't record any sound from the auxiliary audio input or
from the microphone so I don't really know what's up with that okay so what I'm going to do now
is play a tape on it I'm not going to play one that's got my brother's jazz thing because I know
Ken doesn't want me to play any copyrighted music so what I'm going to do is let you hear it
rewinding to get that tape off of there you can probably hear that little wheels are spinning
nice and fast the tape counter is going there's one part missing there there's supposed to be a little
cover over the tape head this one doesn't have an auto shut off the way the big one does over there
on my stereo rack there's supposed to be a little cover over the record and playback heads but it's
missing so I have no idea where that thing is not that big of a deal all right I'll put my
put this tape away my brother's jazz tapes that goes away and now I'm going to let you hear what
what I recorded earlier so I when I was at the office still I was talking about creating a CD that
had the entire well-tempered clavier and goldberg variations at four times their regular speed
and I accomplished that I made the CD and I've recorded the CD to a five-inch reel of tape at
the speed of 19 centimeters per second and that would translate to seven and a half inches per
second and the other speed that that tape deck over there on the stereo rack is capable of
is three and three quarter inches or nine point five centimeters per second now the portable
real to real tape deck will also play at an ultra low speed of four point eight centimeters per second
or one and seven eight inches per second so again my goal was to record the music at the highest speed
on my pioneer RT707 at 19 centimeters per second tape speed and record the music onto it at four
times its regular speed and then when I play it back on the Sony TC222 at one and seven eight inches
per second I think it's going to sound at the right speed now there might be a little bit of a
discrepancy in the pitch as far as like what the exact original was but I think it ought to be
pretty much dead on okay so right now I've queued it up to the fugue in C minor that says I think
it's fugue number two from the well tempered clavier and I'll let you hear what that sounds like
at four times speed playing on the RT707 at 19 centimeters per second exactly as I recorded it from
the CD here we go
now I can slow that down to half speed which would actually be two times the original speed
and it's actually recognizable at that speed but clearly too fast
okay so you get the idea that is at 9.5 centimeters or
what three and three quarters inches per second okay now I'm going to rewind this tape and get it
off of the tape deck and then I'm going to put it onto the Sony and play it back at the slow
its speed and see if I was right about this okay that tape is rewound now I should say that this
is old new stock tape that I bought this this tape is a gold crest double length tape so it's
extra thin and I think it's kind of cheap quality it was not it seemed like it was sticking and
that could be a function of it just being really old but it could also be that it's cheap
and so I'm not confident this is going to sound very good and it'll probably have some
mess-ups in it you might hear in the background my daughter singing I think she just got home and
she's I can hear her down there playing the piano and singing her favorite songs
sorry if that violets any copyright Ken but I have not a whole lot I can do about it
this house the sound carries very well okay I'm getting the take-up reel threaded here
it's a little bit tricky on this one
this tape is a little bit sticky
uh oh it on it came undone okay let me try again
I've gotten a little bit better at this than I was when I did the the previous episode but still
this one when the tape is a little bit sticky it's hard to get it done just right
let's hold that firmly in place
dang come on you
okay I think I got it now all right so I'm going to switch the tape speed over to 178
per second and press play let's see how it goes here
just kind of a low hum I think that's from when I was trying to record on this tape earlier
see when we'll get some music here
all right can I get in here oops there was some failed attempts to get voice recording on here
you know I'm gonna fast forward a little bit to get past this stuff I was trying to use a microphone
I actually ordered a suitable microphone you know the microphone that came with the thing
on eBay for like $15 and it's got a little it's got a 2-prong plug one prong is for the remote
control and the others for the audio I guess and the remote works you when you push it to the
record setting and the microphone is plugged in it won't actually start recording until you
little you flip the little switch and then the wheels start rolling it's actually kind of cool
so the remote control part worked but the audio did not work let's let's try this now
okay
the speed is definitely right it sounds awful but I'm going to fast forward a little bit more
try to find a better spot here
okay this is the one we were just listening to
okay
okay well this is a mixed success the the tape speed is roughly correct it's definitely not
dead on accurate but it's roughly correct so recording music that is being played at 4 times
the regular speed on a tape at 19 centimeters per second then putting that tape on the other
machine and playing it back at 4.8 centimeters per second will basically make it go at the right
speed I would like to try this later with a better quality tape I think this tape is a piece of
junk and so what I might do is just unspool the entire thing so I can have the empty five inch
reel and then put better tape on it I've got a I've got quite a lot of tapes here where I could
just spool some of it off from a seven inch tape and put it onto this one and then try it again
with a good tape and see if that makes any difference anyway I hope you guys have enjoyed hearing
about me geeking out on these old analog tape formats it's been quite a lot of fun I really
really love this new tape deck I wish it would record I'm going to keep working on that maybe
there's some circuitry that's not going right or something I don't know but I'm really happy
to have found a portable reel to reel tape deck and and gotten it into mostly working condition
it's super fun I'm not sure it's all that useful but it's really fun to do so anyway that's
probably enough for now I will talk to you guys some other time maybe about my other recent
acquisitions like an 8-track tape player and a mini disk component for my stereo at work all right bye
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