Picture Courtesy of Mike Cross
The Studio 8
The last tape recorder to bear the famous name. Unfortunately, it wasn't produced by them, but designed and produced by a design team at Wayne Kerr a subsidiary of the Wilmot Breedon Group.
It was their attempt to break into the then lucrative studio market, targeted at Project Studio's, Broadcasting organisations, Film dubbing studio's etc.
Too expensive for all but the well heeled amateur, yet offering remarkable quality, and facilities at a competitive price about £2500 when first launched.
Unfortunately, it came too late, others manufacturers had saturated this market, Bias Electronics, Scopetronics, Studer, TRD, Otari, EMI, and Leevers Rich to name but a few.
- Easy access for tape editing.
Tape heads for this model were manufactured by Phi Magnetronics.
Note: the clean tape path, in keeping with professional design, this was the work of Derek Bond, who along with Gerry Whitman were members of the design team that produced the Studio 8 at Wayne Kerr..
When set-up correctly the frequency response of the Studio 8 was better than 0.1db from 20Hz to 19.5kHz.
Studio 8's in use at the British Forces Broadcasting Studio's in London.
Keeping up the Ferrograph tradition of catering to the military.
Chris Knowles one of the design & test team at Wayne Kerr, responsible for the Ferrograph Studio 8, gives us an insight into what went into the design and build of this professional tape recorder.
Dear George,.
I was a test engineer at Wayne Kerr from 1974 to 1986 and specifically joined the company at the age of 21 as they were advertising for engineers to work on professional tape recorders. After a little while working on repair and calibration of various test equipment - both brought in mostly from the military and in-house product - I at last was put onto the production test team for the wonderful Studio 8 tape recorder. I became the senior test engineer for the product range which included the RTS 2 test box, the digital store (I forget the product name), the AMS1 (a 12" CRT display of frequency response device) and various other bits of equipment. I spent a lot of time working with the design engineers, Robert Brown, Jerry Whitman, Colin Isenman and Derek Bond in developing test methods and equipment - and of course I carried out all the product testing and calibration which was all very interesting and absorbing.
The
heads had two pointed grub-screws front and back, aligned with the gap, for
adjusting height and perpendicularity; this was initially setup off the machine,
then trimmed on the machine with tape running. The front adjuster was very close
to the tape path so one used a small, demagnetised Allen key to do it.
The
general activity in the tape recorder side of Wayne Kerr [incidentally, the name
derives from John WAYNE and Deborah KERR
whose names, allegedly, were prominent on a cinema bill board visible through
the directors' office when the company was first started in the '50's, (in
Kingston, I believe). Our telegraphic address concatenated these words which has
led to some amusement in later years....It was quite intense, as we were trying
to achieve the highest levels of audio performance from what would be regarded
today as very much a mechanical device.
These
tape machines were an engineers delight, since there was a satisfying
convergence of mechanical, electronic and audio disciplines. Some of the
mechanical engineering was a black art - such as minimising wow, flutter and
bearing noise in the capstan motors. These were precision built by Papst, then
we took them to bits and rebuilt them using various bits of test gear to get the
main shaft running absolutely true, and hand working the end bearing to reduce
noise. We had one old chap who spent all his time just doing this. The
difference between a standard motor and a re-worked one could be as much as 10:1
for 'noise' in the capstan speed.
There
were quite a few speed sensors dotted about - three for the main tape speed
sensor, one for each reel motor and two for the capstan motor which used a
photographically reproduced strobe disc and two light sensors, whose signal was
averaged.
Each sensor was opto-electrical and the light for each was supplied by a central precision element bulb and fed out via fibre-optic tails. So we had to become fibre optic experts too! This was cutting edge design at the time and there were very few components around - many of which were not well-developed, so there was great need for adjustment and tinkering at production test time - which at least kept us test engineers in a job. We were quite envious of the big names like Revox, but in practice I think the Ferrograph Studio 8 was the best of its type - 1/4 inch mastering.
There was a version made which used 1/8" cassette tape - seeing a
15" reel of this whirring round at high speed wind/rewind was alarming,
especially as it came on pancake of one-sided reels so it could all go horribly
wrong. But the Studio 8 tape handling was so superior it managed ok.
There
was lots of feedback and semi-intelligence to control tape tension and wind
speed automatically. Most tape recorders of the day had fixed speed wind motors
so the tape speed through the guides and head assembly rose as the take-up reel
got full. This was deemed bad for partial erasure leading to loss of high
frequencies; so our system used the tape speed sensor in conjunction with
electronically controlled AC wind motors to keep the wind/rewind tape speed
constant (although manually variable). Wonderful stuff, and sadly in a way lost
in modern digital recording technology. A whole generation has never heard of
wow & flutter!
I
vaguely remember that we in production were a bit sniffy about the head setup
procedure on the jig and usually had to optimise it on the actual machine. I
suppose in hindsight this meant each machine could have been slightly different
in setup and so one could not swap head-blocks from machine to machine. But then
the spec was so tough to achieve, since each machine had to be tweaked anyway. I
spent many, many hours fiddling to get the last 0.5db at 19 kHz!
I
remember one incident when the 50Hz flutter on the tape was regarded as being a
bit too high, and it was assumed to be because the supply & take-up reel
motors were 50Hz a/c devices - allowing some 50 or perhaps 100 Hz 'cogging'. The
then Technical Director whose name I forget proposed a rather clever and simple
solution - a stainless steel 'finger' in contact with the tape, just before the
replay head (I think) whose weight and dimensions were such that it resonated at
100Hz thus absorbing the tape flutter. I remember he came over to my bench on
which was a production machine and placed a prototype finger against the tape,
and watching the wow & flutter meter we saw the 100Hz component virtually
disappear. The device was quickly put into production and all machines had it
from then on. I think the Studio 8 had class leading flutter performance....
I
remember visiting Phi Magnetronics in
The Studio 8 was indeed over-engineered - or at least it seemed so to us in
production; an awful lot of things needed to be adjusted, both electronic and
mechanical, most of which were inter-dependent which implies that the
fundamentals were a bit flaky. But the performance was truly superb in virtually
every respect and had some cutting-edge control systems. I'm not sure how rugged
it was in the real world, but I know that when the IBA first started recording
from the House of Commons they bought 6 Studio 8 machines to do it.
The
designers' approach to the machine was typically British - brilliant but flawed
through insufficient production engineering and having to rush things into
production to make money; insufficient tooling and so on.
Best
Regards, Chris Knowles