Narrow-Bandwidth Television Association

I still remember that when I started at Philips Research (the Nat.Lab.) in 1971, they had in the basement of the colour TV studio in Eindhoven the remains of a large experimental reel to reel taperecorder for video. Looks more or less like the VERA, only the two reels were bottom and top and the tape was normal 1/4" audio tape. It also ran at high speed, may be 5 m/s or even more. The greatest problem was starting and stopping without breaking the tape. A well known practical problem was that when something went wrong with the tape guidance, you almost immediately had the room filled up with tape, which ran immediately in between the fast rotating capstans, guiding rollers and reels. Then it took much time to undo the machine from this spoiled hectometers of at then useless tape. I had the idea that they never solved that problem and the machine was there already for years and was scrapped later.

A few years ago I was working part time at a radio station when they decided to clean out the "engineer's closet" (partially to stop me from asking them about the goodies inside). Among the treasures I was allowed to take was an Akai GX625 complete with 10" reels. They used it to time-delay satellite broadcasts. I used it for a while to time-delay baseball games while I worked the night shift. It could record for over 3 hours at 3.75 ips. It's a very sexy looking machine and I should really find a spot for it on the shelf just to show it off (the picture below is not of my unit). Audio quality is OK, plenty adequate for FM radio at its highest speed but it could probably use a tune up by someone who actually knows what they are doing. It has a record monitor feature that enables the play head during recording, just like the confidence recording Steve mentioned, although there is a short delay. I had read that some professional recording engineers could use that delay for creative musical effects back in the day.

Found these may be of interest i like the tapewire vintage one.