Binatone Data Recorder

Sinclair User

NO SAVING ON TAPES In June, Binatonc sent me its Data Recorder for review and I found it to be lacking in many respects. Recently another Data Recorder arrived at the office. The Binatone has an upright playing mechanism, tape counter, monitor switch, and will auto-stop from Play. The instructions specifically show you how to plug in the leads from a Spectrum. As before, it could load pre-recorded - commercial - programs easily but, also as before, it would not load a program that had been saved on itself. Even changing tape from a computer cassette to TDK failed to solve the problem. The only way to load a program was to take the tape that had been saved on the Binatone and play it on another deck. If you are looking for a cassette deck to load games the Binatone is as good as any other, although a little pricey at £29.95 - but then you would have to buy another decent deck to play your own tapes. Binatone Int Ltd, [redacted].

Sinclair User

TAPE DECKS ONLY FOR THE DEDICATED Judging from our mailbag many users experience difficulty finding a suitable cassette deck to use with their computer. Ever ready to bow to your wishes we obtained two computer-dedicated decks for review. The first, the Twillstar MC3810, priced £25.95, made us realise the sort of problems you are liable to encounter. The instructions are completely in German. Special cassette leads are supplied for the Spectrum which terminate, at the deck end, in a six-pin and a seven-pin DIN plug. Why so many pins are required when only two are used is still a mystery. The drive mechanism is held vertically and features full autostop and an air-damped door. It has a counter and there are five lights on the front which show if you are loading or saving, and if a signal is present. The deck saved and loaded with no problems - you do not have to swop leads - and managed to load our specially-prepared poor quality tape. Hoping to fare better we looked at the second deck, the Binatone Data Recorder, priced £29.95. This is more compact than the Twillstar unit and has the power supply inside - you have to add your own mains plug. It uses the Sinclair supplied cassette leads and the instructions, in English, even have a diagram of a Spectrum showing what to plug in where. The deck mechanism is again held vertically and the door damped. To the right is a counter, on/off switch and monitor switch. On the side is a volume control, although it features an ALC - Automatic Level Control - and a phase switch which inverts the signal. The whole thing is securely held in a beige plastic case. We saved a program and then tried to load it back. This proved to be impossible. The tape would load on another cassette recorder and we could hear the signal using the monitor, but it just would not load. Details from Twillstar Computers Ltd, [redacted], and Binatone International Ltd, [redacted].

Binatone Data Recorder

ZX Computing

From Binatone comes their contribution to the computer industry. This recorder is an impressive looking unit which is rather large and the cassette housing is upright while the keys form a ledge at right angles at the bottom of it. The whole unit is almost square and as well as the usual Play/Record/F. forward//Rewind/Stop/Pause keys tape counter, monitor switch and power switch are mounted on the front panel. On the left hand side are the ear and mic sockets - marked "output/load" and "input/save" - a remote socket and a sliding volume control (output/load level). Also on this panel is a phase switch which gives normal or reverse phasing to the output, as far as I can tell this has no effect on the loading of spectrum programs. A serious omission is that no provision for adjusting the head azimuth has been made, this is usually a small hole for inserting a screwdriver, a quick twiddle of which has loaded many a reluctant program, however, Binatone assure us that they would be happy to adjust any units which seem to have alignment problems. The instruction booklet is well produced and you'd have to be a complete idiot to misunderstand it. I tried it with a variety of tapes, some old and some new and all bar one loaded successfully , then I tried it with a program which had failed to load on all my other recorders, and, surprise, surprise it loaded first time! At £29.95 it is by no means cheap, but it looks very impressive and has performed admirably. I would recommend it to anyone who feels that it is worth getting a dedicated recorder for their computer. For what it's worth, I can also add that the recorder has been more or less adopted for use in our offices when we want to try out software.