Scully 288-16
A sixteen-track Scully that cost more than a house and showed up on studio equipment lists from Boston to Manhattan.
Overview
The number that stops a collector cold is £11,655. That's the basic price Scully Feldon Recording Ltd. put on the 288/16 in a Studio Sound equipment directory from May 1970, and that was the sixteen-channel machine. Order the eight-channel version and the figure dropped to £6,190, so a lot of the cost sat in the extra head and electronics. For a British studio in 1970, that was not a casual purchase.
That money bought a 50 mm tape machine running sixteen record and play tracks at 1.75 mm each, with a 2 mm erase track alongside. The record head gap measured 12.5 µm, the play head gap a much finer 5 µm, biased at 180 kHz with a 60 kHz erase frequency. Scully published the frequency response as 30 Hz to 18 kHz, +1/−1.5 dB, with signal-to-noise at 64 dB and total harmonic distortion at 0.5%. Crosstalk sat at 47 dB. That matters when sixteen separate performances share one strip of tape, because a bleed between channels is a bleed between instruments. Tape flux at peak recording level was specified at 64 mM/mm, measured on BASF LR56 tape, so the numbers came with a stated reference.
The mechanical side is just as serious. Wow and flutter at the end of the reel, the worst-case point and not the flattering one, was 0.08% RMS. Spool capacity was 27 cm, NAB type. Level metering was VU. Inputs were balanced at −10 dBm into 10K, with a −40 dBm microphone input available. Outputs were balanced, +24 dBm into 600 ohms. Those are studio-line conventions, not hi-fi conveniences.
The 288-16 was not a lone flagship. It was one rung in a multitrack ladder Scully was selling into the same market as Studer and Ampex. The same Studio Sound directory that lists the 288/16 also carries the Scully 100-16, a sixteen-track version of the 25 mm 100-8 priced at £7,600, and describes the 288 itself as the sixteen-track version of the 6.25 mm 280. So a studio weighing up a Scully had a cheaper narrow-format sixteen-track in the 100-16 and a wider-format one in the 288. The price gap between the two sixteen-track Scullys was roughly £4,000.
By the end of the decade these decks were working hard. A 1980 Mix studio directory lists the 288-16 "with full sync 16/8 track" among the tape recorders at a New York facility, alongside Scully 280-4 and 280-2 machines. The 288 is the multitrack anchor there, with 280s handling the smaller jobs. Another Mix listing from the following year records a 288-16 configured as an 8/16-track machine in a studio whose rates ran $195 an hour for the A room.
John Carey, writing in Sound-Arts (June 1980, p.28), reached back a decade to make a point about how studio design had cycled, and named the 288-16 directly. A state-of-the-art room in 1970, he wrote, was a 16-track room, and "the Ampex MM 1000-16 or a Scully 288-16" was the sort of machine that defined it. That's a period source using the Scully as shorthand for the top of the multitrack market at the turn of the decade.
The record leaves out what a buyer today would want. There's no production run documented, no serial ranges, no service history, no parts availability, no current market price. The classifieds from the period show Scully 280-series decks changing hands - a 280-2 with console at $2,600 in a 1975 Recording-Engineer listing, 280B two-, four- and eight-track machines in a 1988 Mix classified - but the 288-16 itself doesn't surface in those ads. That absence isn't proof of scarcity. It's just the limit of what's been found. On a machine this old the transport and head assembly are what matter most, and the documentation says nothing about either.
The 288-16 is a documented, period-verified sixteen-track Scully with a full published spec sheet and a paper trail of professional use. It was priced at £11,655 when new, and a 1980 writer named it as the kind of machine that defined state-of-the-art multitrack in 1970. No survival rate, parts situation or market price has been documented.
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