Telefunken Magnetophon M28A
Six hundred pounds in early-Seventies money, three motors, and a head block that Telefunken promised you'd never have to touch.
Overview
The price is the number that stops people. Telefunken's own advertising for the Magnetophon M28A ran a headline that read, in effect, that at £600 it was expensive - and then argued it was worth it anyway. Whether you quote £600 or £633 depends on which issue of Studio Sound you're holding. The same advertisement appears across 1970-1972 with both figures, and the copy shifted from "AT £600, SURE IT'S EXPENSIVE" to a straight £633 listing. Either way, this was a professional machine sold into professional budgets, by a company that never tired of reminding readers it built the world's first tape recorder.
The M28A is a professional recorder built around a three-motor tape transport running at 3¾ and 7½ ips. That speed range tells you something - this is not a 15 ips mastering deck. Telefunken reserved the faster transport for the broadcast-studio siblings, the 28B and 28C, which ran 15 and 7½ ips but gave up the mixing and monitoring facilities entirely. The M28A is the version with the full electronics package: comprehensive mixing, two-channel monitoring, and a VU-meter amplifier that can be switched between two modes. In the "before-tape" position the amplifier hangs off the output of the mixer. In "off-tape" it reads the replay amplifier instead. Two large VU meters, calibrated to international standard, sit on the front.
The transport is relay-operated and driven by illuminated push buttons. Telefunken described them as needing only fingertip operation. Electronics are solid state throughout, and the construction is modular, which the advertising sold on the grounds of trouble-free maintenance and straightforward replacement of parts. Owners who work on their own gear tend to value that modularity more than the original buyers did.
The head assembly is the piece Telefunken made the most noise about. Period advertising in Studio Sound (June 1971, p.62) promoted the interchangeable head assembly as a key feature of the M28A. Half-track, stereo, erase, record and playback heads are all mounted on a single rigid plate fixed to the main chassis. The company stated plainly that it should not normally be necessary to replace or adjust heads during the normal life of the machine. Collectors note that a claim like that ages well or badly depending on how the deck was treated. The interchangeable plate design at least means a worn head block is a swap rather than a rebuild.
On the evidence of its own literature, the M28A is not a speed machine. The 7½ ips ceiling puts it in the same operational territory as the better home and semi-pro decks of the period, dressed in professional clothes and priced accordingly. Buyers after 15 ips were steered to the 28B and 28C, and the advertising said so without embarrassment.
Documentation for the model is thin beyond the period advertising itself. No service manual figures for frequency response, wow and flutter, or signal-to-noise have surfaced in this archive, and no production run dates are confirmed. The advertisements place it in the British market in the early 1970s, distributed through A.E.G. Telefunken at A.E.G. House, Chancery Lane, with a named contact. A Birmingham firm, Audio Visual Studio and Film Equipment Ltd., advertised a seven-day repair service and a full range of spares for the M28 and M10 ranges. That spares notice is a period document, not a current promise. Anyone buying today should assume nothing about parts availability and verify before committing.
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