Reel To Reel Tape Use In The Theater Question

[DrPinto]

I'm looking for some information on reel to reel tape use in the theater for a project. If anyone has any idea when reel to reel players began their use in the theater and when they began to be replaced, please let me know. The best I can tell is that reel to reel use started somewhere in the early 1950s and was big until the early 1980s, when cassettes replaced the older technology. Am I correct? If anyone has any personal experience with this or a source I can quote from, please post below.

Thanks in advance.

 

[derekleffew]

until the early 1980s, when cassettes replaced the older technology. Am I correct?

Primarily due to cue-ability and ease of editing, open reel tape decks were in use much longer than you think. I had three on a show in Chicago in 1991. In 1995? '96? mini-disc made some inroads, but it wasn't until easy, inexpensive CD burning that r-to-r finally succumbed. Ah, the joys of Tascam 34B and Otari MX5050. Good timeline at http://museumofmagneticsoundrecording.org/ManufacturersTeacTascam2.html .

In theatre, cassettes never really caught on other than perhaps preshow music. Broadcast cart machines (similar to 8-track!) were big on Broadway and in larger theatres for a time.

 

[STEVETERRY]

I'm looking for some information on reel to reel tape use in the theater for a project. If anyone has any idea when reel to reel players began their use in the theater and when they began to be replaced, please let me know. The best I can tell is that reel to reel use started somewhere in the early 1950s and was big until the early 1980s, when cassettes replaced the older technology. Am I correct? If anyone has any personal experience with this or a source I can quote from, please post below.

Thanks in advance.

I used a reel-to-reel machine with auto-stop tabs in 1979 on "They're Playing Our Song" at Broadway's Imperial Theatre. But by 1985, when Lily Tomlin's "Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe" opened as one of the most complex taped sound cue shows ever (Designed by Otts Munderloh, mixed in an acrobatic feat of skill by Bruce Cameron) the move had been made to cartridges.

ST

 

[DrPinto]

In theatre, cassettes never really caught on other than perhaps preshow music. Broadcast cart machines (similar to 8-track!) were big on Broadway and in larger theatres for a time.

Carts? You mean 4-track tapes? That's surprising to me. I would have thought that because of the unreliable tape mechanism and the inability to rewind them, they wouldn't have been suitable for theater use. Could these be edited with a razor blade like reel to reel?

 

[themuzicman]

I have seen old school Masque Sound 45's and EP's from when they were still running their recording studio. I don't know if those simply had the recording SFX and were transferred to some other medium for actual playback or if they were really the show playback media. I know that larger Broadway type shows didn't use Cassette, but went to emerging forms of digital playback like the Akai S1000 sampler. There are even a few Broadway shows pre-QLab/SFX that are still running Akai samplers for playback, though a few of the older ones have found some dark time to swap them out for QLab in recent years. I know it doesn't answer the question about reel-to-reel, but I can ask those older than me next time I'm on a calls with folks in the know.

 

[sk8rsdad]

Carts? You mean 4-track tapes?

Radio stations used to use carts all the time, edited to length and played through to stop at the start. That was back in the early 80's when I last set foot in a radio station so I couldn't tell you when they fell out of fashion but Wikipedia says they lasted until the 90s when MiniDisks and other digital playback formats became available.

As for reel-to-reel, it was common in community theatre in the 70s and 80s. Cassettes were a pain to rewind and cue accurately. Again, digital storage and playback eventually killed the use of tape, particularly once it was possible to cheaply write CDs.

 

[StradivariusBone]

We've got one in our theatre that was built in 1995, not sure of how it was used. I'll try and ask my predecessor next time I run into him. I've still got a reel to reel that my grandmother used to record her Sweet Adeline's quartet with. Surprisingly good quality from the heavy box.

 

[FMEng]

I started my career in broadcasting in 1987. Carts and reel to reel were the formats for recording and playing back sound in a professional environment. By the 1990s, some stations used DAT recorders for time shifting long form programming instead of reel to reel, but reel to reel was kept around for razor blade editing. By the mid 1990s, computer based, networked systems for editing, storage and playback systems took over duties for both long and short form audio, replacing cart and reel. Broadcast Electronics AudioVault and Enco DAD were (and still are) driving forces. At my station, we adopted AudioVault for playback and Spectral for editing, and they ran on Windows 95. Revolutionary stuff back then.

Compact Discs were and still are used, but they are becoming less prevalent. Cassettes, minidiscs, and CD-R were used, but never to a large degree. DAT was always poor in terms of reliability. CD-R was better than DAT but still prone to bad burns and inconvenient in terms of storage and quick access to audio cuts. Cassettes were used heavily for radio news field audio until flash recorders came along.

I can still align and bias tape machines in my sleep. Now, that is useless knowledge and computer maintenance is the skill that has taken over. Computer playback systems seem to be here to stay, and only the hardware inside the box and the OS change as time goes along.

 

[garyvp]

When I started in 1986 we used manually paper tabbed reel to reel for complicated queued shows - lot of tape editing. Although cassettes existed then, we didn't use them until the early 1990's, and didn't abandon the RTR until 1995. Never used Carts or 8 track. We had two twin cassette decks, one with good editing functions. Around 2000 we went minidisk (Masque Sound turned us on to those). MDs were a great leap forward for editing and controlled playback. less sophisticated techs went right to CD's which were exclusively used from 2005 ish onward until two years ago when we went to QLAB/MAC. However, anyone can still use cassette, MD, or CD if they like. The RTR is in the prop closet.

 

[seanandkate]

I remember cutting shows together with RTR up until the early 90s. If you didn't have the dough to upgrade to a DAT or MD, you were cutting and taping...

 

[dramatech]

I started with open reel recorders in 1959. we used almost exclusively Ampex 600 series. I still have an Ampes 602-2 sitting in my living room as a decoration. We used it twice as a prop in two runnings of the Buddy Holly Story. I love it when younger techs ask what it is, and didn't even know that reel to reel even existed. There is nothing like editing with a razor blade and an edit block. White leader edited into the tape provided stop and start cues.