KPM allegedly had reel to reel, at least according to the back of the album sleeves. I was looking at some Canadian Sound Ideas reel to reel boxes the other day. Capitol Hi-Q refers to their LPs as “reels” and I’ve seen one or two tape boxes.
Though comparatively speaking, reel to reel tapes take up a lot of space compared to their vinyl equivalents, especially if a 7 inch reel only holds one side of an LP.
Did stations prefer tape? Quickly cuing up tracks must have been a hassle. Though a lot of library catalogs I've noticed did jump ship from providing stacks of CDs to a single hard drive if not outright digital for the space convenience.
Tape would be superior to vinyl for sirens or telephone sound effects or anything with a consistent waveform. If the record is pressed even slightly off center the resultant wow effect would cause the telephone ringing to “wobble” and change in pitch slightly which is why a lot of old TV shows have really weird sounding telephones.
Great info, thanks. When recording to tape at 7.5ips (a higher quality setting), I can usually fit :45 on one side. So, lets say you can fit an album on each side (and perhaps they were even recorded at 3.75ips which would fit even more. Then you could fit 2 albums per tape - a tape is about double/triple the width (with box) but about half the height of an LP. So size wise- I think it could be a wash.
I guess I was thinking more about television editing, less about radio. I agree quick cueing would be tougher on a tape. But for TV editing quick cueing wouldnt be a priority, and I would think you would want a guaranteed no snap crackle pop sample of the music - something only tape could provide.
One final thought was the difference in cost. I imagine reel tapes would have been much more expensive to reproduce than LP's. As library music was very much about economy, I could see labels not bothering with a more expensive format to pass the savings on the consumer.
