Wollensak T-1616
A Wollensak tape recorder that survives in the historical record mainly as a name in the tape-exchange columns.
Overview
The Wollensak T-1616 is a machine the archive knows existed and knows was used, but cannot fully document. What survives is a different kind of paper trail: the classified "tapespondence" listings in the amateur tape-recording press of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hobbyists listed their equipment alongside their interests to find pen pals who would swap reels through the mail. The T-1616 shows up in those listings with real regularity.
Take the column entries at face value and a picture forms. One correspondent, a nineteen-year-old in New Mexico, listed a Wollensak T1616 running at 3¾ and 7½ ips with 2- and 4-track capability, alongside interests in electronics, special sound effects, and stereo effects. Another, an adult in Depew, New York, paired a T1616 with a Califone 73T and listed the same speed and track configuration - 3½ and 7½ ips, 2 and 4 track, monaural or stereo. A third, in Detroit, ran a T1616 in 4-track stereo alongside a Telectro for 2-track monaural work. He was explicit that he wanted to exchange pre-recorded stereo tapes of piano and organ music rather than conversational tapespondence. Together the three entries point the same way: the T-1616 was a 3¾/7½ ips machine, capable of 2- and 4-track operation, and at least some owners ran it in stereo.
That is the closest thing to a specification the surviving record offers. The archive has no owner's manual, no service literature, no original price list, and no period review of the T-1616 specifically. What it has are the classified columns, and in them the T-1616 appears often enough that it clearly wasn't exotic or rare. It was the kind of deck a hobbyist owned and wrote in about. People listed it by model number without explaining what it was.
One more data point survives, and it helps with dating the machine. A classified ad in the amateur tape press offered a Wollensak Model T-1500 at $149 in "perfect" condition alongside a "Model T-1616 almost new" at $220, together with an Electro-Voice Musicaster speaker and a pair of Koss stereo headphones. The $220 asking price is the only figure the archive can attach to the model, and it needs careful handling. It is a private-party used asking price from an undated clipping, not a manufacturer's list price. It does place the T-1616 above the T-1500 in the seller's estimation, which is consistent with a machine that offered four-track capability where the T-1500 was a monaural unit.
The tapespondence listings also show how the T-1616 was used. These were machines bought by people who wanted to trade recordings - opera collectors, jazz enthusiasts, sound-effects hobbyists, people recording church services and lectures for the blind. The T-1616 turns up in that company repeatedly, which says the deck was reliable and flexible enough to be someone's only recorder through years of tape-swapping. The New Mexico teenager running sound effects and stereo experiments on a T1616 and the Detroit organ-music collector running 4-track stereo on one used the same machine for completely different purposes, and both found it adequate.
The magazine advertising around these listings is notable for what it leaves out. High Fidelity and Tape Recording both ran a recurring Wollensak campaign through 1959 and 1960 built around the phrase "without touching a finger to it" - continuous play, automatic shutoff, automatic rewind, the ability to repeat a passage or back-space (High-Fidelity, November 1959, p.10). Wollensak placed the ads and they set the tone for the brand's consumer line in that period, but they don't name the T-1616. Whether the T-1616 carried those features is not something the archive can confirm from the surviving material, and it won't guess. The T-1616 was on the market while the campaign ran, and Wollensak was positioning its consumer decks around automatic transport convenience at the time.
For anyone who encounters a T-1616 today, here is what the record supports. It's an early-1960s-era Wollensak reel-to-reel, almost certainly a 3¾/7½ ips four-track machine, probably capable of stereo, and documented almost entirely through the people who owned one and wrote in to find someone to trade tapes with.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.