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Author Topic: Would a modern day Barclay-Crocker succeed?  (Read 18478 times)

Offline Ben

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Re: Would a modern day Barclay-Crocker succeed?
« Reply #15 on: April 01, 2009, 11:19:57 AM »
I like the idea of a 60 minutes of music on 10.5" reel @ 7.5 IPS 2 track!
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Offline babyjdrums

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Re: Would a modern day Barclay-Crocker succeed?
« Reply #16 on: April 13, 2009, 05:07:49 PM »
Thanks for the input on that...as a seller of used 1/4 track tapes, I see no one really slowing the purchases due to questioning print through...and yes, it certainly is the bain of the 1/4 track tape and I will consider it.  Possibly one way is to use thicker tape...For most of the titles (and the inconsistency of the brands available right now) I plan on a 1.5mil NON BACKCOATED...non backcoated only because of all the problems tape formulas over the years have had...non backcoated don't seem to have near as many from my experience.  While I plan to keep an audiophile mind about the production of them, I'd gear them more toward collectors...as licensing allows (and affords!) I too will do 2 track tapes that I will have no compromises with...top tape(backcoated unfortunately) and cost no object styled duplication...who wants a crappy tape at the sheer cost of production alone?  It has to be done right.

Offline Ben

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Re: Would a modern day Barclay-Crocker succeed?
« Reply #17 on: April 13, 2009, 05:43:24 PM »
WHERE DO I SEND FOR MY FREE CATALOG OF TAPES?
ENCLOSED IS MY SELF ADDRESSED ENVELOPE...



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Offline docb

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« Reply #18 on: April 13, 2009, 07:24:36 PM »
Babyjdrums, please do us all a favor and identify yourself per the posting rules. It will help you to establish yourself as a credible manufacturer if you ever do start your business.
Dan "Doc B." Schmalle
President for Life, Bottlehead Corp.
Managing Director - retired, The Tape Project

Offline EMB

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Re: Would a modern day Barclay-Crocker succeed?
« Reply #19 on: July 16, 2009, 10:01:53 PM »
Probably not.

Offline alchemist

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Re: Would a modern day Barclay-Crocker succeed?
« Reply #20 on: July 29, 2009, 11:57:46 AM »
Hello everybody--I am brand new to this forum, but may have some information that will be of interest to you. Let me first start out with a paragraph with which you are all probably familiar.

Barclay Crocker's Farewell (Last) Bulletin, written in 1987
"It was a sad and poignant sight to see our much-pampered pieces of machinery- the core equipment of our Barclay-Crocker enterprise- being shouldered like livestock up the ramp of a rental van amid so much panting and cursing and carried off into the night by their new owner. We like to think that the ghost of Howard Kovner (our engineer for so many years) was lurking vigilantly in the leaves nearby to make certain that his precious Ampex 440s and Ampex duplicators were being treated with the same reverence and loving care that he had lavished on them from the beginning. There may have been a whole host of spirits in that parking lot behind our building- customers, employees, suppliers, record company executives- gathered for one last time to witness the fall of the final curtain on the long-running road show of prerecorded open reel. Like a lot of respectable acts, it closed out of town."

I happen to be that new owner, who took the equipment away in the night. For the last 22 years, it has enjoyed a good home and excellent care. You may be interested to know that those same Ampex machines have been used to transcribe and restore the CBS Radio archives, including much of the material from the WNEW, New York vault. So the final curtain has not fallen yet, and really, it is alive and well only 20 miles away from its former home.

In addition to the electronic equipment, we also inherited almost all of the production master tapes, and maybe half of the original master tapes from which they were made.  We could not bear to destroy them. True to my word, I have never tried to mass reproduce any of them. They have only been used for the listening enjoyment of my wife and myself.

Unfortunately, while most of the B-C 7" tapes still play fairly well, they used Ampex 406, 407, and some Grand Master tape for the 1/2" production masters. Those tapes hydrolyze badly, and even notes in the boxes, written by Harold Kovner, refer to many of them as "shedders". Proper dehydrating restores most of them to excellent playable condition, but, unfortunately, there are a few that have dropout issues.

As you may know, the way the process worked was that the master tapes were 1/4" encoded Dolby A. They were decoded, and then transferred to  1/2" Dolby B, which was the production master. That was the tape used for duplication. The production masters sound remarkably good when played back on the original machine that recorded them, through the original Dolby units that encoded them.

That being said, trust me when I tell you that the original masters sound even better.

Because the tapes may eventually become unplayable, I have started to digitize them, if only for the fact that I can have access to the music on my boat. I hadn't done this before, because frankly, digital was not up to the task. 24 bit, 192K sampling now gets rid of a lot of digital ills.

So, after such a long diatribe, I will finally get to my point. I do not have enough tape stock left to duplicate this material on reel to reel, but I can make a few copies available in digital format. And since what we primarily do here is tape restoration, much of the original noise can be eliminated (or not), with little or no degradation. I am not trying to get rich quick or flood the market with cheap copies. It seems that here you have a group of people really interested in quality sound and production values, who might appreciate access to material previously unavailable. Please let me know if there is any interest, or if I am just being a blasphemous devil. David

PS: We also still have the original duplicators; and yes, they work.





Offline ironbut

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Re: Would a modern day Barclay-Crocker succeed?
« Reply #21 on: July 29, 2009, 02:18:15 PM »
Hi alchemist (btw we use our real names here),
Welcome to the forum.

I'm genuinely sorry to inform you that selling items here is not allowed. I realize that what you're offering in more in line with a service that is unavailable anywhere else, but those are the rules. Unlike other forums which are supported by sponsoring companies, this is more of the public face of a business. You're welcome to contact the management  for approval like some others here, but what you're offering includes another more serious problem.
Even though Barclay-Crocker is sadly, no longer with us, the rights to the material which they purchased to produce these tapes are still owned by the parent music companies. These rights may or may not be orphaned for any particular recording but seeing that the Tape Project depends on maintaining good relations with these companies even minor infractions can't be tolerated here.

Like I said, I'm sure that you meant no harm, but this is not the forum to distribute your transfers (even if they were free).

That said, I'd love to hear more about the models of duplication equipment and the set up that was used by BC to make their tapes. We did have a one post visit from Alex Abrash who was the last engineer (I'm sure you must have met him). http://www.tapeproject.com/smf/index.php/topic,350.0.html

Also, if you could relate any particulars of the duplication line, we have a thread pertaining to that here;
http://www.tapeproject.com/smf/index.php/topic,895.0.html

Thanks for your understanding.
steve koto
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Offline docb

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Re: Would a modern day Barclay-Crocker succeed?
« Reply #22 on: July 29, 2009, 02:39:12 PM »
Hi David,

Welcome and thanks for the great info. I see that Steve has covered some of the rules of posting here. My impression was that B-C was licensing their material from other labels and as such Steve is right, the rights to the recordings are held by the original owners, and the license for distributing that material would have been to the original owners of B-C and now long expired. New licenses would need to be negotiated and paid for before any distribution could be done. If some is original material actually recorded and owned by B-C and you did acquire the rights to the material from B-C as well as the tapes, then that would of course be more simple and those would be of great interest, I'm sure. And I think folks would want them in the original analog format. If you do have some titles that the rights of which are yours perhaps we could help you produce them in a format that is even a little closer to the original masters than B-C's state-of-the-art-for-the-time format was capable of.

A little off topic aside - as I am typing this the local jazz station, KPLU, just played a Jacqui Naylor song followed by Sonny Rollins' St. Thomas...
Dan "Doc B." Schmalle
President for Life, Bottlehead Corp.
Managing Director - retired, The Tape Project