$27,000
Here is yet another outstanding high-end component from France. Gallic engineer Christophe Martinez devoted four years of his life to designing and building this brand-new, two-track, quarter-inch, 15ips/7½ips reel-to-reel tape player, developing (entirely on his own) the deck’s physical design and layout, the eq and gain electronics, the tape playback and wind/rewind path (including the “strain-gauge” sensors that maintain tape tension at 0.5gm and read and correct errors in less than a millisecond), and the unique, built-in, multi-function touchscreen that is the brain of the unit. The result is rather incredible, especially given the price. Here is a deck with a level of utility and convenience that is unrivaled in my experience. Virtually every playback parameter can be set or adjusted via a tap on its touchscreen. Of course, none of this ergonomic excellence would matter if the TP-1000 didn’t sound great, which, I’m happy to report, it does. Although its treble is a bit less extended than that of, say, the Ultima Apollo, everything else about its sound would make it hard to choose between it and its more costly rivals. Listening to 15ips R2Rs will never be a bargain, given the ongoing cost of acquiring those tapes, but as the best new and completely refurbished tape decks go, the TP-1000 is a bit of a steal. (350)
Tags: ANALOG TAPE REEL-TO-REEL AWARDS GOLDEN EAR
Latest Videos
By Jonathan Valin
I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.
More articles from this editor
