We used to have to clean the heads of the Ampex D2 machines we had at E! with some kind of caustic Benzyne solution. I casually looked at the label one day and saw a big warning sticker that said to always wear a vapor mask and gloves when handling the solution. Hmmm we never did get gloves or masks. I did get Squamous Cell carcinoma in my nasal cavity a few years ago though. That’s something I guess… 
Not sure if it was caustic but we cleaned the heads with a chemical called freon. Wasn’t that was they used to put into air conditioners
I was never a fan of these machines. Agreed they had superior tape handling and their off-speed dynamic tracking went up to 3x (compared to 2x with Sony) but they were too big for a crowded tape floor (Sonys were rack mountable) LOUD and required much more maintenance. In my opinion, the best machine Ampex made was the DCT. Too bad the format never really caught on.
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The shuttling to play and servo lock speed of the DCT made it the heavy weight champion of the world. Plus it might eat your hand if you weren’t as quick as it was while loading.
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The DCT tape transport was the culmination of the development of the transport technology started with the VPR-3 1" deck and carried over the VPR-300 D2. I think if Ampex had chosen to include a pre-read function on DCT, it would have done much better in the market. It couldn’t compete with DigiBeta though.
We used to clean the heads on our Sony1" machines with a product called colclene, which was banned many years ago, I think it may have been carbon tetrachloride.
That’s right! I forgot about the ol DCT. The first place I worked at we had two of them: One in the online suite - a GV Kadenza (anyone else have one of those chip farms?) and the other was data-only. We used it to archive the flames. I think it was renamed DST but I don’t recall.
I faintly remember DCTs being named after the compression algorithm they used: discreet cosine transform. Their industrial design was really cool for the time…
She told me anyone would be lucky to have you.
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Yup…remember those tabs by the thousands. First room out of college, Ford Communications Network, Convergent editor, Cross Point Latch switcher and DSC Eclipse DVE…3/4 room pre SP…and i thought it was the shit.
I was told by an Ampex exec that the DCT was a byproduct of the DST. Same machine hardware but was designed to be used for data. (just like a big LTO drive)
i would come home from work everyday with about 10 of these in my pockets.
I owned 4 dct machines at one time - they were fast and if you didn’t use a deck.for a while it would eject the tape then whip it back in if you selected it on the ace edit controller. The elevator and thread was FAST and would make the machine room jump.
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@mikeparsons OMG I remember that.
I hated using this at college so much. Flame classic’s desktop reminds me of it. shudder
