I've seen a lot of these recorders come up for sale lately, they look like they're for institutional settings, most likely to record class. Does anybody know more, are any worth looking at?
they were used to learn languages, spanish, french, german etc. they recorded on one track (student track) while the other plays (teacher track) , than you can replay what you said. so they can play and record at the same time on different tracks
So a more modern version of this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_lab we had one of these at school, propably installed in the 1960s, with a reel to reel tape recorder under evey desk It must have been a 1960s fad as people who went to other schools said they had them. By the 1970s they seemed to have gone out of fashion as we never used it. In fact I just found a paper from 1975 discussing this https://www.jstor.org/stable/30077237?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents I would guess that lacing up 30 or so reel to reel tape recorders for each lesson was too much hastle. French lessons did make extensive use of a reel to reel tape recorder and Nuffield "Audio Visual French" media which came on small 5" ? Tapes along with 35mm slides to go along with them, usually describing the activities of Jean-Paul and Marie-Claire. The phrase I will always associate with French lessons is "Duncan - le magnetophone s'il vous plait" as I was usually the one who was sent to get that lessons tape and lace up the tape recorder. Funny that I set up a reel to reel tape recorder a hundred or so times at school and haven't used one since.
Matsushite had quite a few as well. LL==Language Laboratory They were Mono but with a 2-Way head which allowed to record both student and teacher. And balance.
Those are great looking decks, much nicer than the first generation mono cassette decks but I don't ever remember using one, even in a foreign language class, maybe that's why we don't see them very often in the US.
Yep, they are interesting, no digital technologies were available yet so the idea was to use 2 head ways separately - for "student" and "teacher", good idea BTW.
