Ampex F-4470
A $695 portable four-track that shipped with its own performance record, and a motor that never needed oiling.
Overview
The F-4470 was the flagship portable of Ampex's F-44 Fine Line Series, a four-model family of four-track stereo recorders aimed at home, industry, and education use. At $695.00, it sat at the top of the line, above the F-4460 portable at $595.00, the walnut-mounted F-4450 at $579.45, and the F-4452 custom-install chassis at $549.50. The extra money bought a built-in dual-channel amplifier and speakers. That made the deck a self-contained recording and playback system instead of a component that needed a separate amplifier to make sound.
The F-44 Series was positioned as a direct replacement for Ampex's earlier 1200 Series, and the company's launch material promised "major advances" over the outgoing line. The oddest of those advances had nothing to do with tape handling. Each F-44 shipped with an individual performance record, made available to the purchaser once the completed warranty card came in. That record documented frequency response, signal-to-noise ratio, flutter and wow, and crosstalk rejection for that specific machine, initialed by the person who ran the measurements. Owners knew what performance to expect from their own unit, not from a generic spec sheet. That level of documentation was rare on consumer gear of the period.
The transport centered on a new hysteresis-synchronous motor designed specifically for the F-44, with a dynamically balanced rotor and fan for smooth, quiet running. Ampex's literature claimed the motor never needed reoiling under normal conditions. The deck carried three separate heads - record, erase, and playback - each engineered for its own role instead of sharing duties. The design used all-metal shielding and narrower channel widths to suppress adjacent-channel crosstalk. Separate record-level meters for each channel placed the indicator needles for quick, accurate reading, and a per-channel record indicator light guarded against mistakes when making four-track monophonic recordings. A special control let the owner pre-set the machine to shut itself off. The recorder would also stop automatically if the tape broke during unattended recording or playback.
Contemporary coverage treated the series as a serious proposition. HiFI-Stereo (February 1964, p.36) walked through the family's control layout, noting that slide switches handled power, loudness compensation, stereo/mono operation, and the filters, with the high- and low-frequency filters switched together. The reviewer singled out the F-4450 as the unit actually tested, and described the F-4470 portable as the F-4452 chassis fitted with its amplifier and speakers. The same report noted the rear apron carried input jacks for three types of phono cartridges. High Fidelity (February 1964, p.61) found the measured characteristics well suited to their intended functions and called the RIAA disc playback characteristic very good. The tape-head playback curve, though, drifted several dB from standard. That would matter mainly to users playing prerecorded tapes through a deck lacking its own preamps.
By the late 1960s the F-4470 was circulating on the used market at much lower prices. A 1968 classified in Audio (January 1968, p.67) listed an F-4470 at $325.00, while a 1969 listing in the same publication offered one "in case with amplifiers and speakers," running 3¾ and 7½ ips, in excellent condition. Another 1969 ad described an F-4470 as "like new" at $275. That is a drop from the original $695 to the low hundreds within a few years.
The F-4470 is the most self-sufficient of the F-44 family: the portable with the amplifiers and speakers already aboard, which can be plugged in and used without hunting down a period amplifier. The customized performance record, when it survives with the machine, is the deck's own factory test sheet. The tape-head playback deviation flagged in period testing is worth checking before trusting the deck with prerecorded tapes. The hysteresis-synchronous motor, whatever Ampex claimed about oiling, is the part that decides whether a survivor still runs quietly.
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