Maybe ,but if I remember correctly it was difficult to try and get Q4 releases , and the selection was limited.
Correct, I purchased all of mine mailorder. Most from "Barclay Crocker".
I bought mine from "Kelly's Stereo Mart", it cost about $1700. The Akai GX-630DSS. I bought it for Quad but it had record monitoring capabilities for home studio use. I did make a few such recordings of a friends band, because I had the ability. Home studio use was never my top priority. I used it with 10.5" reels to make long stereo mixed tapes as well.
I saw the Q4 tapes the first year or so. Then they disappeared because they didn't sell.
I've never seen pre-recorded stereo reel tapes for sale in a store either.
IIRC, I saw a handful back in the 60s and EARLY 70s. If it wasn’t a record store, it might have been Sears . But they were rare. I had just a couple of them in the day. Once my R2R died and I couldn’t afford a new one, I gave up.
Back in the 60's, I remember Harmony Music, in North Miami Beach, having a large selection of 4 track, R2R stereo tapes, going for $7.95 each.They had them from RCA, Columbia, Capitol, and a few smaller labels.
The ones I saw back then were 4 track.
I haven't found a test record useful for "dialing in" a cartridge. If the cartridge is properly aligned in the head shell, tracking force properly set, anti-skating adjusted properly, you'll get the best from the cartridge. If you can adjust tracking angle, that's icing on the cake. Not all turntables offer an adjustment for that. One little hint... if you have a "grooveless" segment on a record, as few test records have, I've found that if I use a laserdisc (yes, I still have a player for those) to set the anti-skate, I can adjust it more precisely than just setting the anti-skate control to the same setting as the tracking force. Since there are no grooves, it's easy to set anti-skate so that the arm, when lowered to the disc surface, stays put. No movement in, or out. When you can adjust the anti-skate on the fly, as my Technics 1200mk2 does, the adjustment is quick and easy. My favorite cartridge, a Denon DL-110, sounds wonderful after that.
Check this thread for some good suggestions.
If I’m not mistaken, most quarter-track consumer R-R decks will play that recording. I know with my long dead Akai X-1800SD, the tracks were interleaved by playback direction. That meant playback compatibility with half-track, but recordings made on them would be a mess on a half-track stereo recorder.
First we had full-track mono.
Dolby Surround was compatible with both SQ and QS decoders. All Quad decoders did a much better job than Dolby's official decoder!
