Norelco 4-speed reel to reel Model 401 and the demo tape.
Putting up an odd, strange and dead media format restoration
center as mentioned in the Talking Book thread - employing
disabled, overweight, blind and senior citizen men who are
tired of sitting at home by themselves - and this is one of a
few pieces we are trying to run across.

Yes, a few are on eBay - but for totally ridiculous prices - and
then we still need the 4-speed test and demo tape it came with.
Or, even a 32 bit 192 KHz transfer of it onto a DVD-Pro-Audio
that we could then bounce back onto a professional dubbing
player to get a reel copy of the tape we need.

We figure these tapes were dubbed en-masse the same as any
other - so no considerations would have been made at the plant
for all the different speeds on the tape. As such - we figure - with
a high-enough resolution copy thereof - we can do the same here.

Because a customer has all kinds of 15/16 and 15/32 7-inch
that we REALLY do not want to have to bump up to 10-inch
double-speed tape just to be able to transfer it on our equally
4-speed Akai which tops out at 15 and bottoms out at 1-7/8.

It's bad enough to have to assign a guy a WHOLE WEEK worth
of 8 hour days just to be able to transfer ONE TAPE at 15/32
nevermind having to assign a guy to dub it onto a 10-inch as well.

The 401 Philips recorders we sold never came with a demo tape. If they did, the
crappy dropout plagued 1/4" 4 track, tapes wouldn't sound good at 15/15 IPS. Also
a demo tape would not have been made on the machine it was packaged with.

I worked on all the Philips domestic tape recorders from the TR1 right up to the
cassette era, and, when they went from 2 track to 4 track the dropout complaints
started.

Good luck on finding a 401 (runs on germanium transistors) with decent rubber
after 50 years.

Also I was a reader for talking-books-on-request for CNIB, and a Roberts was used.

RE: Rubber tires and idlers and etc I have been sending to hattiesburg Mississippi to get rebuilt forever at $25 a tire just went up to 35 because of the scarcity of the neoprene.

Plus - he's the only one I ever found that can get the superflex white neoprene belts for like a Concord 440 or a Dual belt drive turntable from the 80's or any number of other pieces that can't use the stiff black neoprene from Russell Industries - beccause the ``right'' size is too tight in the normal stiff-belt configuration and the next size up is too loose and falls off.

RE: The one a friend of mine has - he's been using that cobalt-doped tape you could get for a few years in the late 70s and early 80's before EE/chrome reel tape came out - and had a lot fewer dropouts than on your normal 202 or whatever formulation was around in the late 60's.

I had some reels of BASF LPR-35 CR tape that was originally brought out for the quarter-inch stereo audio-frequency-modulation units that came out in the early 80's for like three seconds - got a new lease on life as EE tape for another three seconds - and then went into the discount bins for years afterward.

I gave him a couple reels of this and he says that the dropouts are almost unnoticeable even at 3-3/4 - and the 1-7/8 still has some appreciable fidelity on it - about what you'd get off an SCA mall-music FM radio subcarrier transmission.

Which is the other reason I want one of my own.

RE: the demo tape.
I missed out on it from an eBay Auction last Spring because I was out of town, but the guy sent me a CD-R of it (taped from a normal 7-1/2 IPS player). I figured I'd just be able to tape the CDR right back onto another 7-1/2 IPS recorder like it was played on, record each segment back into the computer at it's right speed, restore and then go on about my business. Except the guy taping it switched from 7-1/2 to 3-3/4 in the middle of one of the ANNOUNCEMENTS - giving that ``whoop'' sound as the speed was changed during playback - which is IMPOSSIBLE to replace from another source unless you have the original tape and can transfer it again.

If it would have been one of the music selections, that would have been a snap to drop in a different transfer since I know whose performances they all are and where most of them can be found (Eastern European orchestral recordings for Reader's Digest box sets in the early 60's) But this kind of announcement is impossible to correct for digitally and might take a hundred takes to correct for in an analog fashion from doing the exact same thing he did - change the speed during playback.

He also sent me the JPEGs of the front and rear box art as well.
So if ever I can figure out how to upload a photo, I'll do that as well.

Have you found a 401 yet ? I am fairly sure I have one here, and I'll post a pic when I
find it. You also might try to find a 301, it is the 4 track mono version that can play stereo
tapes if you connect an external amplifier.

Seeing whether a guy on ebay will take $15 and Free Talking Book Player shipping instructions (because it has 15/16 IPS) instead of $30 and normal shipping for a busted up needs restoration player.

Even if he says yes I'm still gonna need a guy with better eyesight than me to do things other than put the new rubber rollers and drive belts on and spray the contacts etc.

Well you already know how I'm aware of that one. (LOL) it's the same one the LOC/NLS used for 4 track mono talking book reel to reel copies that ran at 15/16 - with the masters on the dubbers running off 10-inch reels at 1-7/8.

Which - as a restoration and transfer engineer - some of which I have recently inherited for transfer which I am having to play on my Akai 330 because it's the only 1-7/8 IPS 10-inch 4-track player I have ever heard of (Logging versions of B-77's and A-77's are half-track).

The 2 track UHER Universal-S was a wonderful machine, electromagnet
transport control. I used those in language labs, and they were a part of
sleep learning applications. They had 15/16 as lowest speed.

The transistorized version, the UHER 5000 was involved in the White House
affair in the Nixon era. The segments overwritten by high speed erase function
someday may be undone, if anyone cares enough.

Here are some UHER machines that also have 15/16 speed and 7 inch reels:

Mod's note :

For discussion about the types of recorders and their merits, please start a discussion in the vintage audio forum. Reply to this thread only if you have the machine that the O.P is looking for and you're willing to sell it.

John