$150,000 in 1981 - how times change

[almeriastrings]

Just imagine you wanted to cut 24 tracks in 1981. So you buy one of these...

http://mixonline.com/TECnology-Hall-...cm3324-090106/

Move on 30 years and here they are on Ebay..

http://www.ebay.es/itm/SONY-PCM-3324...item53ed184a3b

They really did sell for $150K. That's 1981 $ too.... now, you can hardly give them away. They make a good (barn) door stop, though...

Think of how many Loars, or pre-war D-28's you could have got for $150K in 1981....even old Neumann tube mics... all of which would have held and increased in value incredibly..... today, even kids with basic home studios would reject this old Sony... "you mean it's only 16-bit?".

Times certainly do change.

[Ben Milne]

Pretty sure Chris Lord Alge still uses a 3348 to track with...

But yeh.

[G7MOF]

Incredible! I think my Grandma was right when she said, The only thing certain in life, is death. lol.

[Ivan Kelsall]

How very true !. I remember the very first hand-held calculators that we had at work,Hewlett-Packard HP-25/35's.They were around £300 ($480 US) each to buy,& that was around 1973 (ish).They were however,a massive improvement on the electro-mechanical calculators that we'd been using,huge great things like the old time cash registers.These days you can buy a calculator that will do far more than the old HP's for a mere fraction of the price.Thankfully not all progress 'improves things worse' !,
Ivan

[Markus]

Ivan, now your phone is a calculator ... having a separate device seems so 1973.

[Tim2723]

Your phone is a calculator and everything else imaginable.

[jaycat]

"My telephone is also a camera . . . and my sunglasses are also a tricycle."

--Tom Waits

[Darren Bailey]

MY phone is a phone. I've had it ten years and never so much as sent a text. I have a camera for taking photos and my toes if I want to do sums. I also play mandolin.

[Paul Kotapish]

You can do 24-track recording on your iPhone these days:

http://www.harmonicdog.com/

But it's never been about the deck and the board, really, has it? Les Paul, George Martin and the Beatles, and all those sonic pioneers worked their magic with tools that are laughable by today's standards. A great player on a good instrument with a decent mic and someone who knows where to place it comprise about 90% of what you need.

Fun to look at old music technology, though. Anyone have a Mellotron? You can get an app for the iPhone that sounds pretty darn close, too.

[Eddie Sheehy]

Yesterday would have been Bob Moog's 75th birthday...

[Ben Milne]

But it's never been about the deck and the board, really, has it? Les Paul, George Martin and the Beatles, and all those sonic pioneers worked their magic with tools that are laughable by today's standards.

Looking at the gear the is being auctioned from Les Paul's estate, I wouldn't class much of it as laugable. Astonishing perhaps as to the quantity that had been amassed over the years, but all very much quality classic stuff.

Nor would i lump the EMI preamps and rest of the classic gear the George Martin used into a laughable category.

[jaycat]

We all work with the tools that are available at the time. Does anyone wish that Robert Johnson, or Bill Monroe, or Louis Armstrong, or Jimmie Rodgers, had recorded direct to digital?

[foldedpath]

We all work with the tools that are available at the time. Does anyone wish that Robert Johnson, or Bill Monroe, or Louis Armstrong, or Jimmie Rodgers, had recorded direct to digital?

Well, maybe Robert Johnson. That would have saved years of argument over whether his voice sounded like that, or it was an artifact of the recording.

[Ben Milne]

Going digital would probably have induced more argument...

[neil argonaut]

I suppose the other thing that needs to be considered is that back then, spending that money would bring far more chance of a return for your investment, as there would be much less competition for sales of recorded music, due to the prohibitive price of making it, and you could charge people for use of your studio with this recording equipment, in a time when making quality multitrack recordings at home wasn't an option.

[jim simpson]

I recall in the mid 80's, a 3340 reel-to-reel would go for about $500 used. I swapped one for a used 70 Mustang project. I think the Mustang would be worth more today if I still had it. I then bought a Tascam 234 4-track cassette recorder new for around $500.00. It was one of the 1st pro quality cassette units. I recently sold a 234 that had all the rubber belts and capstan roller replaced for $150.00.
Now I'm finally trying to learn a digital recorder.

[Tim2723]

I'm certainly no financial expert of any kind, but $150,000 seems like a lot of money for a tape recorder. Granted it's probably the ultimate professional, super-sophisticated, do everything model, but in 2012 dollars that's nearly $400,000! I'm not saying this isn't true or anything, but that seems like a very unrealistic price tag for any piece of technology, even from that era. How many of these things were there?

[Ben Milne]

A Teac 3340 reel to reel is nothing along the lines of this baby. This certainly ain't the average tape machine... If one were available at the right price near me I'd snaffle it.

This was absolute cutting edge digital technology, purely for the realm of high end recording studios with established clientele such as major labels. Getting one probably wasn't a matter of if they could afford to have one, but whether they could afford not to (actually probably only the studios backed by labels could have afforded them IE Sony themselves).


Considering where computer technology was at at that time, it's remarkable that such quality could be achieved.

Think about how much processing power is required by your home computer to process 24 tracks of 16bit/48k audio.
30 years on, our best computers available to the consumer market can do this.
In this digital recorder's hey day, computers were more expensive, (mostly available only to governments and corporations) and could perform only a minute fraction of what today's machines are capable of.
Anbody care to speculate what a 2.8ghz computer with 4GB of RAM and 1TB of hard drive space would have cost in 1981? (To suggest that it were possible might have been cause for a call to a mental institution).

[Tim2723]

I suppose when all things are considered $400 grand is a drop in the bucket to the recording industry. I wouldn't be surprised if Justin Bieber makes that much while brushing his hair. Just seems like one of those 'wow' moments to me, as in "Wow! That's an expensive tape recorder!"

[Santiago]

I remember covering the launch of the PCM-3324 when it first came out. The professional community was dead set against a rotary head design, which the Japanese preferred because they could piggy back production on lines building video cassette recorders. But, American and British studio engineers insisted on Stationary Head recorders which enabled them to do razor blade edits. This made them more comfortable with the new digital medium because it was like the analog machines (invented by Les Paul). Hence, there was a standards split between Mitsubishi and Sony, which Japan really hated. It was also eventually discovered that studios sporting brand new Mitsubishi recorders also had chief engineers who were suddenly driving new Mitsubishi Starion sports cars, and studio owners weren't at all happy about it.

[almeriastrings]

Razor blade edits... those were the days. Could be tricky enough on analog. I don't even want to think about what it must have been like doing it on digital.

Looking at that beast reminds my of the (rather more modest) tape recorders I worked with back in the 70's when I was doing after-school evenings helping out with theatre sound. There was an old, but very nice, Ferrograph Series 5. I would imagine these were not often seen in the US? They were hand made in Britain (as opposed to, you know, China), and were an all-tube recorder. That one was built sometime in the mid 60's. Later, there was a Ferrograph Series 7.

Here's a bit about those:

http://www.ferrographworld.com

They were a 'reely' () great recorder. There was also a Nagra portable and a superb Revox A77 (A Mk III as I recall). All of those things weighed a ton. Even the 'portable'! Alas... all long gone. They got (very) warm and even smelled nice! The little Tascam DR-100 I use now has a far better spec and you hardly know you're carrying it... but though it is very efficient and makes fine recordings, somehow, it lacks the 'magic' of those old machines. Oh, and no razor blades required either...