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The first truly new addition to the audio system that
I shared with my siblings was an Akai GXC75D that my
father gave to the family for X-Mas in 1973. It occupied
the space on the cabinet on top of a Scott 330C tuner
130 preamp combo. Since it was a cottage system, there
was little purpose for the companion to the 330C, a
335 adaptor, which sat unused beside a Dynaco Stereo
70. The Dynaco was a huge amplifier for the Wharfedale
W3's, and we had a blast with the loudest stereo on
the lake. A Garrard 301 with a Lenco tonearm and a Shure
M91ED was the final touch.
Having read the owners manual, which states quite simply
that the Dolby noise reduction system would only be
useful for reducing tape noise, I patiently explained
to my father and brother that, no, it would in no way
make an improvement to scratchy records. Dolby was quite
useful in 1973. Low noise tape was about as noise-free
as a low noise audion. In fact, the Akai, a very expensive
machine, was no better with low noise tape than was
any mediocre piece of junk that I had access to at school.
The only way to get anything approaching decent performance
was to spend the big money ($6.00 for a 90 minute BASF
tape in 1975) in chrome tape. Any cheap ferricobalt
brand available today will give better performance than
any tape that you could hope to get back in the mid
1970's.
Tape performance improved dramatically by 1980, and
by 1990, purchasing anything other than a cheap formulation
would be overkill. These cheap formulations provide
spectacular results with even ancient machines. The
Akai GXC75D has the one piece of technology that allows
me to test that assumption. I don't need to. Somewhere
buried in storage is a GX36D, which like the 75, uses
glass and crystal heads. Akai boasted that these heads
would suffer no wear after 15,000 hours of use. I have
spoken to aficionados about the Akai head, or for that
matter, Sony's excellent ferrite&ferrite heads,
which also offer tremendous longevity.
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I put the GXC75D to good
use for about 5 years, at which time the cottage
was burgled, and the Akai was taken. It happened
that a few days ago, a neighbour called me up to
tell me that there was a pile of audio junk out
in front of a house for sale, and that I should
check it out. I scored a professional TEAC reel
to reel (3300S) and the GXC75D. A sentimental journey,
I thought. It had a problem with its switches. |
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Fortunately, the problem
went away with limited attention on my part. A good
thing, since when I removed the bottom cover and
attempted to disassemble the circuit boards to gain
access to the rear of the switches, I discovered
that there was no way to do so without desoldering
most of the connections to the board. That wasn't
about to happen, sentimental journey or not. |
The switches that seemed to be affected were the OLS,
the Dolby, and the tape selector switch. It soon became
obvious that the problem lay in the selector. My options
were to redo its contacts in a haphazard way by applying
a stabilant to the top of the switch and allow it to
work down into the contacts, or to find some middle
ground where the switch's internal problems were mitigated.
The latter happened in practice. The switch seemed to
perform properly in the chrome position, and so I did
all of my listening to prerecorded tapes with the chrome
on, and the Dolby off. The effect is similar.
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Since I did much listening
through Sennheiser 424 headphones, and since the
Akai's headphone jack could not deliver anything
close to an acceptable amplitude into the 424's
2k impedance, I hooked an adapter cable to the higher
impedance, higher amplitude output. The Akai proved
to have a more than adequate output for the 424's
in this configuration. |
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The GXC75D is an auto-reverse
machine. That's why my father purchased it. I was
a surprised tyro who wouldn't look a gift horse
in the mouth, but I quietly wished that he had purchased
the top of the line model, a 3 head Akai that wasn't
much more expensive. I can only imagine that the
top line model, with no direction reversal, would
have been a better choice. Even the more modest
GX36D with its stationary head, would be a better
choice. But the 75 does rather well, considering
how it physically moves the head up and down, and
switches channels between three recording tracks. |
These gaps are a bit smaller than the 1/32" of
a standard stack, and Akai placed a significant gap
between the recording tracks. From my measure, the tracks
are about 1/40", not enough to make the tapes made
on a GXC75D incompatible with other machines, but it
certainly permitted greater latitude with saturation
before it would become detectable in the adjoining channel.
I am also impressed with the fact that the mechanism
in the well worn GXC75D that I tested continued to work
without fail after 30 years of use and collecting dust.
I am also impressed with the longevity of the switch
that is required to reverse the channel signal, depending
on the direction of tape play. Since the record/playback
switch also worked without incident (a bugbear with
a whole class of Sony decks), I was able to test its
recorded performance. Since the meters only travel to
+3dB, I was not able to test saturation with ferricobalt
tapes, the cheapies, which are good to about +5dB with
a modern deck such as the 1980 TCK71 from Sony that
I refuse to sell, despite repeated offers from one source.
Recording with the Akai allowed me to revisit what
I have always felt to be Akai's best feature. Called
OLS, or Over Level Suppressor, it was a vital ingredient
to successful recording when tapes had little headroom.
If you pushed the signal, you got saturation very quickly,
and if you were making a tape of your favorite booga
booga record, the one with scratches and nail polish
remover stains, OLS was the ticket to a decent maximal
amplitude recorded, with perfect suppression of transients
like scratches. Akai went to great lengths to point
out that OLS was not a limiter, and, indeed, my experiences
with Sony decks equipped with limiters told me that
indeed, the Akai method was the one to utilize, and
that a deck equipped with it might be a useful studio
accessory as a pass-through device.
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In Sept. 1981 I put a
photograph of a detail of the switch on my studio
door. I wrote in gold ink something that I didn't
necessarily feel -disregard the OLS. None of my
open reel machines had the feature. At a studio
party a studious pair asked me what it meant. I
explained the process. But it also got me to thinking
about the letters OLS themselves. Soon I had changed
the name of my studio from Studio7 Mobile to Over
Land Studio. OLS. Over Land was another way of saying
mobile. |
Back then I would drag some terribly heavy suitcase
full of an open reel machine, mixer, mics, interconnects,
etc., to live shows in Montréal. I liked to make
live recordings of bands that I was working with. With
the introduction of the Sony Walkman Pro and its companion
stereo microphone, I replaced the suitcase with a small
bag toted over my shoulder, a microphone stand in my
hand. The saturation capabilities of premium metal tape
(over +8dB) and the Walkman Pro's amazing tape transport
makes it almost as effective a recording instrument
as the high quality open reel machines that I used until
1984 for location work.
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The GXC75D has a substantial
transport and even after all this time, it grudgingly
wound tapes that other machines have trouble with.
On the other hand, there was a bit of a tractor-ish
aspect to the transport. It is audible from a few
feet away, but the noise isn't obtrusive and can't
be compared to the high pitched noise that my Philips
CD player emits with some discs toward the end of
play. This is hardly a new problem, or unique to
the Philips. I would be far more inclined to put
a CD player behind some sort of noise barrier before
I began to feel a concern about the noise of the
Akai's aging transport, and I have always been surprised
that the designers of CD transports have given so
little consideration to what seems like an unforgivable
flaw. |
I can only guess that there are a few old timers out
there who wanted this Akai, but couldn't afford its
steep $450.00 price tag in 1973 dollars. Back then,
we were in the middle of an oil crisis, cars were the
size of buses, and had engines that were so large that
they gave at best eight or nine miles to the gallon.
Not much has changed, actually, if your vehicle of choice
is a SUV.
The GXC75D certainly fit in with all that big attitude.
It is a large, heavy deck. But its practical value has
been tested and after 35 years, it works, almost perfectly.
I don't know how often one would come up on eBay. I
expect that you can find one for chump change.
ed.
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