Scully 100-16
A sixteen-track Scully that shows up in classified ads, rare, expensive, and almost never described in print.
Overview
The Scully 100-16 survives mostly in the back pages of trade magazines. The archive has no factory spec sheet, no owner's manual and no measured review. What it has is a paper trail of classified advertisements. The machine appears, disappears and reappears in the for-sale columns of the recording trade press across the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The earliest trace in the archive is a June 1977 classified in DB-Magazine (June 1977, p.51). A seller offered two Scully 100-16 tape machines described as being in mint condition, at a price of $10,500 for the pair. That is the only original asking price documented here. It comes from a private seller, so it is not a list price or a measured market value. Classified pricing in this era was fluid, and "mint condition" was doing a lot of work in a two-line ad.
A second data point is a classified listing in DB-Magazine (August 1981, p.64). It offered a Scully Model 100-16 Track, serial number 200, described as remanufactured original equipment and in the hands of one owner since new. Scully's broadcast and studio tape transports were built in relatively small batches, and a serial in the low hundreds is consistent with that pattern.
What the 100-16 actually is, beyond the name, the archive cannot confirm. The model designation implies sixteen tracks, and the classified listings consistently call it a tape machine. But no source in the archive documents the tape format, tape speed, track width, head configuration, transport type, dimensions, weight, or power requirements. Anyone claiming to know these details from a spec sheet is working from something this archive does not have.
The one thing that can be said with confidence is that the 100-16 sat in the same professional tier as the other sixteen-track machines traded in the same classified columns. A March 1979 listing in Studio-Sound (March 1979, p.20) placed a Studer A80 16-track with autolocate at £12,500 alongside a 3M M79 24-track at £15,500. That is the kind of company the Scully was keeping in the used market. The Scully 100-16 does not appear in that ad, but the pricing context is useful. Sixteen-track professional tape machines were five-figure instruments in the late 1970s, and the 100-16's $10,500-for-two asking price in 1977 sits plausibly within that band.
The archive has no record of production years for the 100-16, no record of how many were built, and no record of when the model was discontinued. The 1977 and 1981 classified appearances bracket the machine's documented existence but do not define it. It may have been in production for a narrow window. It may equally have lingered in the catalog for years. Without a factory document, that question stays open.
Maintenance and parts are a genuine concern. Scully's professional tape machines used mechanical and electronic assemblies that are now decades out of production. The classified ad describing a 100-16 as "remanufactured original equipment" suggests that even by 1981, keeping one running took active intervention. Buyers today should assume any 100-16 they find will need work, and that documentation such as schematics, alignment procedures and head specifications may be difficult or impossible to source. The archive has no service manual for this model.
The Scully 100-16 is a documented machine with a thin paper trail. It appears in classified ads, it commanded real money, and it carried a low serial number. Beyond that, the archive cannot go. Anyone with a factory spec sheet, an owner's manual, or a period review of the 100-16 is welcome to contribute it.
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