Ampex ACR-25 Commercial Player Question

[TVBeeGee]

You bet! I worked at a station where all engineers were required to wear neck ties. The only exception was if working inside the ACR-25. (For obvious reasons!) The design is late 1960's. The machine debuted at the 1970 NAB Convention. It did include a heavy safety bar that came down into the carousel path when service doors were opened to prevent the carousel from moving if the mechanism was exposed.

Cassettes were driven into and out of the carousel by a pneumatic piston, one on each side, below each of the two transports. This is some of what you hear making that characteristic clunking noise as cassettes are shuffled in and out of the carousel.

The ACR-25 was an absolute wonder of the video world at the time it premiered. Unlike the RCA competition, the Ampex machine shuttled at 600 inches per second and used time code (not beep tones) for cueing, and required only 30 ms (one video frame) preroll. The TBC had a window of one full video line. Price was $160,000 in 1970...over one million US dollars in today's money. The station I worked for owned two machines, with four transports total.

Note that the vacuum guide that holds the tape around the video heads fully retracts BELOW the tape path during threading and unthreading. The Mark XX video head was the only quadruplex scanner ever marketed that had this feature and was also used on Ampex's incredible AVR-1 open real VTR. The Mark XX featured an eight phase head motor.