Masthead

Wollensak T-1515-4 Recorder
Wollensak T-1515-4 This is actually my father's machine but I feel an attachment to it. I would have sworn on a Gutenberg Bible that I'd bought another one at a garage sale and that we had two, but I can't figure out what happened to it. On the other hand, I know we had at least three Webcors and they're all gone. Yet I can put my hand on every crappy cassette player I owned as a kid. God has a dark sense of humor.

Another machine that needs attention. This one has a leaky filter capacitor (you get a nasty AC hum in the audio), and I haven't gotten around to opening it up yet (see notes on the 1515 above).

Wollensak was owned by Revere at the time, and Revere made a line of reel tape machines. They decided to make a separate line of recorders using the basic Revere mechanism, but with a radical new look and design. After that, Reveres and Wollensaks were made at the same factory but by separate groups, and they were very competitive against each other.

The 1500 is the classic Wollensak, introduced in 1957. To appreciate it you really have to see it side-by-side with its contemporaries. Take my Webcor Royal. It's the size of an accordion case, the cabinet is fabric covered wood and it weighs 42 pounds. The Wollensak has a metal case (mostly bare-aluminum with a white cover), is about the size of a large toaster and weighs 20 pounds. I'd say their performance is a bit in favor of the Wollensak (frequency response is definitely higher). The only big thing the Webcor offers that the Wollensak can't do is play and record in both directions (i.e. you don't have to flip the reel to play a particular side), and the Webcor's full-sized cabinet allows you to leave the reels loaded with the lid closed.

Wollensak made a large number of improvements to the 1500 over the next decade, but the basic metal-cabinet remained the same. My T-1515-4 is the 4-track stereo player version from around 1960. The 1515 also has the "Stereo" logo on the top right of the cabinet (just over the push-button controls), but it only handles 2-track stereo playback.

You have to be careful with Wollensaks because most of them look almost identical, even though their specifications vary; the good part is that you should be able to tell the model easily from the name plate on the back of the unit. I made a comparison table to try and make sense of it all.