Stewart’s decks were bequeathed or sold by his parents to his friends, Philip Rutkowski, Simon Heyworth (of Manor Studios fame), Jonathan Billington (MFA) and myself. His video decks and monitoring went to his workplace at the BFI, where he led the video restoration team. His work colleague Mike Kohler was promoted to Stew’s job at the BFI and all his machines are still in active use, whether audio or video.
Fantastic, I remember a post from him, when he must have been, understandably, down, talking about putting it all in a skip.
I’m glad it’s with people who’ll put it to it’s proper use.
Nice to know that Stewart’s machines went to good homes Charlie , I’m sure they’ll be cherished as yours is
Stewart was a lovely generous guy. Sitting in his room at Scalford in the early hours with the lights down is what got me into R2R.
He was a very unassuming and modest guy too
I was messing about with domestic machines till I had a conversation with Stewart at one of the shows
He spent a good while taking me through the basics of his lovely Sony APR and told me if I ever come across one I should snap it up as it’s the last machine I’d ever need
I hadn’t met him before that and by the time I left I felt he was a good friend , very generous with his time and knowledge
I picked a nice condition APR up years later , his words rang true as it’s a stunning sounding machine
It’s now in the safe hands of Simon G at Audio Related for a much needed fettle…I dropped it off just before the uk came to a standstill , fingers crossed I get it back home soon
Your APR5000 will come back inn super nick from Simon G. SG used to head up the Sony Pro servicing Dept, before they withdrew from tape (video and audio). SG used to look after lots of APR5003s, which were in constant use in film houses, where the timecode could be used with the film to synchronise the sound onto the pictures during post production.
Cool Charlie
Paul at audio related did say there waiting list for repairs/Service work was pretty long when I dropped the APR at there workshop
They certainly weren’t fazed when I asked if they were up for a doing the work to the machine ,unlike others who went out there way to avoid it
I’m sure it’s in the best hands with Simon , hopefully it’s just the internal battery that’s causing the fault code as suggested on the Yahoo users group
I have it too. Be interested to hear what you think.
WTF are Duophonic & Biasonic ?
Six million dollar lamb
I think Duophonic was Capitol Records proprietary method for turning mono into stereo format; Biasonic I think is their way of squeezing as much dynamic range onto the tape.
This is quite an interesting read in its own right but does bring up Biasonic
The Biasonic process was developed by Magnetic Tape Duplicators (MTD), in 1965. In the May
1, 1965, announcement in Billboard, MTD’s Cliff Whenmouth promoted the quality of their
process over that of the newly-hyped eight-track cartridges, stating that the Biasonic process
“produces 3 ¾ ips tapes with the fidelity of 7 ½ ips.” Prior to that the development of the
process, Capitol had largely refrained from releasing any further Beatles product in the reel-toreel tape format.
Early ‘stereo’ recordings are generally pretty average IME.
The mono versions are often way better.
YMMV
Yes I agree that given a choice between mono and ‘simulated/ artificial stereo’ then I’d go for mono.
I’ve got a stereo MFSL or similar SACD edition of Pet Sounds in stereo somewhere and it sounds great.
I suspect that being contemporary and labelled as duophonic that this tape will probably not be the same master etc.
I have much higher hope for the Atlantic records 7.5 ips tape of Aretha Franklin live double album ‘Amazing Grace’ - one of my all time favourite albums.
I looked at amazing grace on eBay last week but it went for a bit more than I wanted to pay.
You must have bought it
I bet it’s good