Tandberg Model 62
The two-track half of Tandberg's Series 6 - a semipro deck that sold for 110 guineas and earned its keep in working studios and serious home rigs.
Overview
The Model 62 is the two-track sibling of the Model 64, and Tandberg's British advertising through 1964–66 priced them identically at 110 guineas each. That parity is the whole story of the Series 6 line: the 64 gives you four-track, the 62 gives you two-track, and Tandberg asked the same money either way. Buyers choosing the 62 were paying for track width and the headroom that comes with it, not for a stripped-down machine.
Tandberg's own advertising billed the Series 6 as a "semi professional Stereo/mono tape recorder" built around a cathode follower output, three speeds, three heads, and four amplifiers, with "Sound on sound" among the facilities. The copy in Studio-Sound (October 1965, p.20) went further, with the slogan "Whenever the demand is for precision, reliability and natural sound reproduction - the choice must be Tandberg." That is marketing, but the feature list under it is specific: high and low level mixer inputs, on/off tape monitoring, and simultaneous record and playback for sound-on-sound work.
Where the 64 splits the tape four ways, the 62 records and plays back in two-track stereo. That is the configuration working engineers reached for when a recording was going to be edited or mastered rather than just played. The three heads make that practical. Separate erase, record, and playback heads mean you can monitor off the tape while recording, and the on/off monitoring switch lets you compare source against playback in real time.
The four-amplifier architecture is worth pausing on. In a stereo deck of this vintage that generally means dedicated record and playback amplification per channel, which is a more serious build than the single-amp-shared-between-channels approach common at the price. Tandberg paired it with cathode follower outputs — a tube-era topology chosen for its ability to drive long cable runs and low-impedance loads without the output stage complaining. Owners running the 62 into a separate preamp or console will recognize why that matters.
The machine turns up in professional hands, not just hobbyist ones. Studio-Sound (October 1965, p.20) featured Tandberg advertising its Series 6 line, including the Model 62 two-track alongside the Model 64 four-track. Hackett was using the deck to record his own nightclub performances and then evaluate arrangements at home, which is the semipro use the Series 6 was built for.
By 1966 the 62 was circulating on the used market at meaningful discounts. Those prices tell you two things: the deck held real value, and owners who bought one tended to keep it in good order.
The record does not give a production run. No start or end year for the Model 62 appears in the available documentation, and the advertising and classified evidence only places it firmly in the mid-1960s.
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