Grundig TK 24
Fifty-five guineas bought you six hours of four-track recording and a microphone, backed by one of the most confident sales pitches in the history of tape.
Overview
The TK 24 was a four-track reel-to-reel machine. Grundig's advertising was blunt about who it was for. "There are two kinds of people who'll want this new TK 24 - the inexperienced and the experienced," the copy ran, in a campaign that appeared in Studio-Sound through 1960 and 1961. Neither group could have known better, because nothing better existed. That is marketing, not a lab report. It does show what Grundig thought it had: a machine that removed the usual trade-off between fidelity and playing time.
The pitch was specific. The TK 24 recorded four tracks, which meant six hours of record and playback from a single tape. It would also still play back conventional twin-track 3¾ ips tapes, so owners didn't have to scrap their libraries. Four-track operation allowed trick effects too: two tracks could be recorded separately and then played back together, or played separately to double the available time. Grundig sold this as accommodation rather than complexity. The price was 55 guineas (with conflicting manufacturer documents citing 62 guineas) including a microphone, as quoted in the company's own advertising and in a dealer trade-in listing of the period. That listing put the TK 24 in the same bracket as the Grundig TK 20 at 42 guineas (with conflicting manufacturer documents citing 52 guineas).
Grundig's copy in Studio-Sound (August 1960, p.9) described the TK 24 as making "no compromises." It promised high fidelity and long play at the same time, and it leaned on the simplicity of the controls alongside the styling and compactness. Whether a domestic four-track machine from 1960 could deliver on both counts is a question the advertising avoided.
The record contains no measured specification. There is no frequency response figure, no wow-and-flutter number, no signal-to-noise rating, no tape speed list beyond the 3¾ ips implied by the twin-track playback claim, and no dimensions or weight for the TK 24 itself. Period advertising and dealer listings establish the price and the feature set. Nothing in the surviving documentation establishes how the machine performed on a test bench.
The TK 24 also turns up in a piece of period trivia. A 1961 issue of The Tape Recorder carried a photograph of Jack Warner - Dixon of Dock Green himself - rehearsing with a new Grundig four-track TK 24, having previously owned a TK 819 that he'd passed on to charity.
Treat the TK 24 as a documented-but-unmeasured machine. The price, the four-track format, the six-hour capacity, and the twin-track playback compatibility are all on solid ground. How it sounds, how it wears, and what breaks first are not. Anyone buying one should assume the usual servicing questions apply, with no period guidance to lean on.
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