[Scott Dorsey]

philicorda wrote:
The transport is certainly from some other TEAC decks. The construction
inside the 144 is quite amusing, with odd shaped bits of metal screwed
together all over the place. It somehow doesn't look like it was made for
mass production. It is at least possible to separate it into it's main
components though, compared to a densely packed modern 4-track.

Odds are they use the same transport mechanism in a dozen different
machines. That's how they keep the costs down.

Another odd thing is that there is almost the complete circuitry for four
track simultaneous recording, with four record amps and bias traps.
However, you can only record two tracks at once, and there are only two
channels of dolby encoding available. It's as if it was going to be four
channel record, but they changed their minds at the last minute.

Probably they made a version with the same PC board stuffed a little bit
differently, as a full four-track machine. For one thing, doing this
halves the cost of Dolby licensing.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."