Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Here’s a different type of post tonight. My 15 year old son has an Ampex AG-440 and we’ve meticulously restored and merged parts to make one good solid unit. It’s been a project throughout 2025. We purchased a new pinch roller, recapped most of the preamps circuits and cards, and sent the heads out for re-lapping (this resurfaces the heads, and brings the audio quality to near original specification). The downside is that this particular set of heads has around 20% life left, and new old stock is unobtanium.
During the process of getting these decks, we inherited about 100 master tapes, most at 15 ips in 2 track mode. The recordings were all from the Racine, Wisconsin area under the Bob Melteson “Natural Sound” independent label.
Here’s a master tape of an artist named Gregory James. Here’s a cover of Scarborough fair and it’s quite nice.
This is the same deck that recorded the tape over 50 years ago in 1970!
We’ve meticulously digitally transferred and preserved these recordings, and we found some of the artists and reconnected them to these recordings.
Tonight I’m using one of Pioneers last receivers from 1990 which has a lot of buttons with a great fluorescent display - the VSX-9900S paired with HPM-100 speakers.
Here’s a different type of post tonight. My 15 year old son has an Ampex AG-440 and we’ve meticulously restored and merged parts to make one good solid unit. It’s been a project throughout 2025. We purchased a new pinch roller, recapped most of the preamps circuits and cards, and sent the heads out for re-lapping (this resurfaces the heads, and brings the audio quality to near original specification). The downside is that this particular set of heads has around 20% life left, and new old stock is unobtanium.
During the process of getting these decks, we inherited about 100 master tapes, most at 15 ips in 2 track mode. The recordings were all from the Racine, Wisconsin area under the Bob Melteson “Natural Sound” independent label.
Here’s a master tape of an artist named Gregory James. Here’s a cover of Scarborough fair and it’s quite nice.
This is the same deck that recorded the tape over 50 years ago in 1970!
We’ve meticulously digitally transferred and preserved these recordings, and we found some of the artists and reconnected them to these recordings.
Tonight I’m using one of Pioneers last receivers from 1990 which has a lot of buttons with a great fluorescent display - the VSX-9900S paired with HPM-100 speakers.
