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They’re known as Private Labels in the trade
but we generally refer to them as Own Brands. It’s been common practice for
years and concerns large companies flogging anything from baked beans to cars,
bearing their name and logo, trading on their own reputation for quality and
value. Own brand items are usually competitively priced and sometimes they’re
every bit as good as rival branded products; in some cases they’re identical
and may even come from the same factory. Occasionally they’re actually superior
and that seems to be the case with this Penncrest miniature portable
reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Penncrest was one of the house brands of J C
Penny, the major US department chain store with outlets in almost every large
shopping mall. This little machine dates from the early 1960s and at the time
was one of thousands of Japanese made portable reel-to-reel tape recorder
flooding the market. When tape recorders first appeared in the mid fifties they
were an expensive novelty and comparatively rare, in the home at least, but the
arrival of the transistor and Japanese manufacturing skills changed all that.
However, models like the Penncrest were at the lower end of the domestic tape
recorder performance scale. In fact most small machines were little more than
toys, due to their poor sound quality and short running times of 10 to 15
minutes, but in general they worked well enough for recording speech. Many of
them were used in quite grown up applications, such as inexpensive dictating
machines or for making ‘audio letters’, to send to friends and relatives
abroad. In the US they were especially popular with families with members in
the armed forces serving overseas.
This model is fairly typical of the breed with
a simple rim-drive deck mechanism. To re-cap, this is where the reels are
driven directly by the motor spindle, acting on the rim, or via an idler wheel.
It’s a cheap and reliable method of spinning reels of magnetic tape reels but
the speed at which it passes the head changes as one reels empties and the
other fills up. It’s hardly noticeable when the tape is replayed on the machine
it was made on but it can sound a bit odd on other rim-drive machines, or an
upmarket model with a constant-speed capstan drive mechanism. 
The design is a little unusual, though. It
looks like a quality product with stylish, black mirror-finish case panels,
heavily chrome-plated reel platters and neat little touches, like a custom case
for the microphone, held in place by clips inside the detachable lid. The
transport mode and volume controls are neatly laid out on the front panel,
along with mini jack sockets for the supplied microphone and earpiece.
Otherwise the spec follows a familiar pattern with two-track mono recording and
a 4-transistor amplifier handing recording and playback signals. There’s a
small built-in speaker close to the left hand supply reel, and like almost all
modestly priced rim-drive machines, it has a permanent magnet erase and just
four basic transport modes. They are Stop, Play, Record and a quick-ish Rewind.
Fast Forward is very rare on machines of this type due to the added complexity,
and cost. Even so it is surprisingly well made with an all-metal chassis, one
of the better designs of Japanese motors and smooth moving parts. It uses two
1.5-volt ‘C’ cells for the motor and a single 9-volt PP3 type battery for the
amplifier. These all live in a compartment on the underside of the case. It
also has a detachable carry handle, a removable and it would have come with a
full tape and empty take-up reel.
I’ve had this machine in my collection for more
than 20 years and its origins are long forgotten. However, the lack of case
marks and any signs of internal tinkering indicated that it has had little use
in its long life and is still in near mint condition. I wouldn’t have paid more
than £5 – 10 for it that being the going rate and my upper limit for small tape
recorders bought in the late nineties. Back then they were still abundant on
early on-line auction sites, car boot sales and antique fairs. It still works
as well as it ever did, though the supply reel platter was a bit stiff but it
freed up easily with a squirt of spray grease. Sound quality is fine for speech
and there’s plenty of volume. 