Presto S1- stereo cutting head 1960

[studiorp]

Hello all, today I have discovered a thing incredible : too the Presto brand had built in 1960 a stereo cutting head licensed by Westrex. Normally there are many Presto mono, but Stereo ???

Here the catalogue ( page 199 ) :

http://www.technicalaudio.com/pdf/Electronics_Catalog_Extracts/Presto_tape_disc_recording_1960_REM_24.pdf

Could be wonderful find this head, but where ? I don't know how many pieces has been produced...

[emorritt]

I have a later sales brochure on the S-1, but as many researchers concur, this head probably was only made in prototype form. If any units were sold, they would have gone to recording studios and Presto's primary customers were in the radio business. The 14B lathe was designed for mastering work, to replace the 8D series, but the head would have fit either machine, even a 6N. The head appears in sales literature almost during the sale of Presto to Lear-Siegler. The FCC didn't approve an FM stereo broadcasting system until 1961, so no radio station would have had interest in stereo equipment. Mid-market recording studios of the time couldn't afford stereo equipment (e.g. Sun, etc.), and the bigger studios would have been using Scully-Westrex, Neumann, or Lyric system, with Neumann or Ortofon heads. I have been a 'hunter gatherer' of disc recording equipment since 1977, and have never in any magazine, newsletter, online forum, eBay, at auction, in storage, museum, or other venue, seen an actual S-1 head, other than the one pictured in your catalog scan or on my sales brochure. Large studios wouldn't have been interested in the 'shrunken head' version of a Westrex, and smaller studios probably couldn't lay out what most likely would have been around $6000 at the time ($48,000 in today's dollars) for a Presto stereo system, so it's doubtful that the S-1 went into large scale production like the 1-C or 1-D.

[studiorp]

Yes, probably was so, but if was inserted in a sale catalogue of time, I think that some pieces has been sold, perhaps, only 5 or 10, but more of a prototype secure...
Interesting design, in each case.

[EmAtChapterV]

For a second I thought this was the Classifieds & Tip-Offs forum, and was so hopeful...