I'm going to introduce you to my old lady. I'm hoping that she's still going to be running, you know. This is Bertha. She's an Ampex, eight‑track, one‑inch multitrack tape recorder.

Probably represents some of the best sound quality that you'd be able to record. They were just done to make the very best sound recording you could, with the equipment available, you know.

You can still hear the difference in the sound, because it's coming from here. It's bigger, it's warmer, fatter. There's a lot of argument about it, but digital can't really touch this.

It's like the difference between a picture in a newspaper and a photograph. The picture in the newspaper looks like a photograph, but it's made of dots — so there's holes in between. This is continuous tone.

I mean, she's not been used now for about seven years. Mainly 'cause I didn't have the space to have the old girl operational. So it's nice that this space has come available. Got her out and cleaned up so far — ready for testing with some tape, and hope that she still rolls and all the needles still rock about, you know. Hopefully we'll have her up and running and making that big, warm sound again. Yeah, looking forward to it.

She's a heavyweight piece of gear, and you need four quite strong people to lift this onto a truck. Even the power supply. So it's a weighty thing — the motor in that machine could take your arm off easily, you know. This is a big machine, it's powerful. When you get the capstan going, you'll know it, you'll hear it. It's like an airplane taking off. So it's difficult to have the machine in the same room as the artist, because it is quite loud.

Every now and again you'll see little lines of chalk going past on the tape. Well, that's the only way you could tell where a track began. You'd actually mark the tape with white chalk. That was the beginning of a track.

When I first got her, I brought her down from Reading on the back of a flatbed truck. So it was lucky that it wasn't raining that day! See, this tape is old, and as such it's kind of sticky. That's why you have to kind of roll them, one side to the other, to unstick the tape.

And the original owner was a man called Rod Argent. He had a band called “Argent”, and had quite a big hit record — a tune called “Hold Your Head Up”. So quite likely recorded on this here machine. You smell that old tape smell. I'm hoping that this will loosen it up.

After that, she was with a man called Martin Campbell, a reggae producer — Channel One UK. I used to use her when I used to use the studio there in the early days, and liked her so much that I bought her.

Again, you'll see a little set of white marks go flying past. These machines — using one inch for eight tracks. So you start off with quarter inch for two tracks, then half inch for four tracks, and then they put eight tracks across one inch, and sixteen tracks across two‑inch, which is the same format. After that, going to three‑inch tape was kind of ridiculous, so they put twenty‑four across two‑inch — so really you're reducing the quality then, because you're putting more tracks across the same amount of tape. So really, these machines are the ultimate in sound recording. That's why they were built.

On this machine, you can't just press stop. You have to kind of put the brakes on first. The way these things work is that the faster the tape runs, the higher quality and bigger definition and sound dynamic you get, because you're using more tape to print that piece of signal.

The capstan is now running. The problem now is that the tape is so old that it's a bit sticky still. So what I'm going to do is forward and reverse the tape a few times, so it gets some air between the layers. So this one runs at seven‑and‑a‑half and fifteen IPS — fifteen being pretty much industry standard. But you can get machines that run at thirty IPS, for even higher quality. Some mastering machines would run at thirty IPS, but it makes it very expensive on the tape. Even at fifteen IPS, you'd get maybe five songs on a roll of tape. I don't know what that costs now, but back in the day it was about fifteen pounds for a roll of tape. But you know, this — this is quality, and you pay for quality.

But she's already rolling a bit better. Yeah, baby! She's been in a garage for five years. She's going to be a bit stiff, you know what I mean?