Ampex AG-500-2
A professional two-track Ampex that turns up in studio inventories and classified ads far more often than it turns up in spec sheets.
Overview
The AG-500-2 survives mostly in the record of where it was used, not in any tidy brochure. The most concrete documentation is a buyer's guide in High Fidelity (August 1969, p.48). It lists the AG-500-2 under Ampex's Professional Division in its recorder roundup, with a monitor head, an extra playback head, and a four-track configuration among the checked columns. That one line is about the firmest contemporary description of the deck's features in the period press. It puts the machine in the professional half of Ampex's line, not the consumer half.
In practice the AG-500-2 was a working studio and location recorder. The classified pages of the trade magazines are full of them changing hands between engineers. A Recording Engineer ad offered a "new Ampex AG-500-1 in case" alongside an "AG-500-2 unmounted" - the paired listing hints at a family of related AG-500 variants sold with and without cabinetry. A complete two-track location/studio package for sale included an Ampex 440B-2 and an AG-500-2 together with microphones, cables, and a console. That suggests the deck was the sort of thing a working remote rig was built around.
Later documentation confirms the AG-500-2 stayed in service well past its introduction. A deck still appeared in a 1983 studio roster, which is the clearest evidence of its longevity.
Collectors and studio veterans tend to meet the AG-500-2 in two states: as part of a complete location package, or as a bare transport pulled from a rack. The "unmounted" wording in the trade ads matters here. These decks circulated as transport-and-electronics assemblies that owners built into consoles or road cases to suit their own needs, so a surviving example's configuration often says more about its last owner than about how Ampex shipped it. Buyers should expect to evaluate one as a working professional machine, not a collector's shelf piece. The classified-era descriptions ("mint cond.," "unmounted") are the historical record of how these moved through the market.
Tape speeds, original pricing, and the deck's internal design are not documented in the sources available here, so they stay unstated rather than guessed. What can be said is that the AG-500-2 was a professional Ampex machine that earned its keep in studios and remote rigs through the 1970s and was still turning up in working inventories into the 1980s.
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