Revox PR99

The affordable Studer. A broadcast workhorse — on strict playback-only duty here.

Some machines were built to be admired in living rooms. The PR99 was built to run all day in a radio station and be fixed in fifteen minutes when it didn’t. It is the least sentimental machine in this collection — and that is exactly what I find sentimental about it.

Introduced

1980 · Switzerland

Lineage

Studer-Revox — the B77's pro sibling

Speeds

15 / 7½ ips

Format

½-track stereo · 10½″ reels

Connections

Balanced XLR, +4 dB

Motors

Three-motor transport

Frequency response

30 Hz – 22 kHz ±3 dB @ 15 ips

Weight

18.5 kg, rack-ready

SECTION 01

The Merits

The PR99 exists because European radio stations in 1980 wanted a Studer and couldn’t afford one. So Studer-Revox took the consumer B77 — itself the descendant of the A77 sitting two shelves over in this collection — and rebuilt it for work: a raised transport chassis so the heads are easier to reach, transformer-balanced XLR connections at professional +4 dB levels, front-panel calibration, an extra damper arm in the tape path, and rack ears. The result was honest enough that stations bought them by the thousand and ran them for decades.

And they last. Production only ended in 1997 — the last open-reel machine to leave the Regensdorf factory — and a well-kept PR99 today still does exactly what it did on day one: pull tape past heads with unglamorous, repeatable precision, all day, every day.

This is Swiss engineering in its plainest dialect: nothing added for show, nothing removed that matters, everything placed where a technician’s hands will find it.

SECTION 02

The Quirks

The PR99’s quirks are mostly the honest consequences of what it is. It speaks professional +4 dB balanced audio, so plugging it straight into a home hi-fi takes adapters and a little level arithmetic — it assumes you have a mixing console, because in its first life, you did. It is half-track only, so your quarter-track family tapes will play back with the other side whispering underneath, backwards. It doesn’t do charm: rack handles, utilitarian switchgear, and a face only a broadcast engineer could love.

Then there’s the version maze — Mk I, Mk II, Mk III — and it genuinely matters when buying. The Mk II added a real-time counter with zero-locate and varispeed and is widely considered the sweet spot; the Mk III cut costs, deleted the microphone inputs, and its electronics cards don’t interchange with earlier machines. Check which one you’re looking at before money moves.

And mine? Mine is on strict playback-only duty. There’s precedent for that: Revox offered factory playback-only configurations for radio playout, machines that spent whole careers never recording a single reel. I like to think mine has simply retired into the family business.

SECTION 03

The Sound

Neutral, steady, and completely unbothered. At 15 ips through the balanced outputs the PR99 does the broadcast thing: it gets out of the way. Where the A77 flatters a recording with a little warmth around the edges, the PR99 hands it to you as-is — 30 Hz to 22 kHz of “this is what’s on the tape, take it or leave it.”

For playback of well-made half-track tapes, that neutrality is exactly what you want. The family line runs A77 → B77 → PR99, and you can hear the romance being traded for reliability with each step. I keep both ends of that line for a reason.

Sound demo — coming soon

Straight off the balanced outputs, once the signal chain is set up properly. No phone microphones, promise. Check back.

SECTION 04

Buying One

First, pin down the mark — I said it above and it bears repeating with money on the table: Mk II is the sweet spot for most collectors (real-time counter, zero-locate, varispeed, better component suppliers), Mk III is fine but its electronics cards don’t interchange with the earlier machines and the mic inputs are gone. Then ask what the machine did for a living: many PR99s worked hard in radio stations. That’s not disqualifying — they were built for exactly that — but ask for head photos and look for flats and wear lines, and treat the hour-meter story with healthy skepticism.

The service checklist is well-trodden Revox territory: a hardened or glazed pinch roller (rebuildable), tired electrolytic capacitors and the notorious little RIFA mains-filter caps that crack and smoke, scratchy trimpots, brake linings, and back-tension out of spec. None of it is scary, because parts support for the B77/PR99 family is arguably the best in the entire hobby — dedicated Revox specialists still stock rollers, cap kits, brake bands, even new-old-stock heads, and the service manual is thorough enough to rebuild the machine from the bench up. A playback-only example like mine needs even less: playback alignment and a clean tape path, and it earns its keep.

Power is refreshingly easy. Most PR99s have a multi-voltage mains selector (100–240 V taps), and European units are set for 220–240 V out of the box. The capstan is tacho-servo controlled, so — like the Technics — mains frequency is irrelevant to speed. Confirm the voltage tap setting before first power-on and you’re done.

How mine runs in the Philippines

Most of my collection came from Japan and lives behind step-down transformers (Philippine mains is 220 V / 60 Hz, Japanese domestic machines want 100 V — and 60 Hz-sensitive ones get set to match our grid, which they happily do). The Swiss PR99 is the exception in the rack: set to the 220 V tap, it drinks straight from the wall.

That’s the whole collection.

All twenty machines in the collection now have their own write-up. Thanks for reading this far — explore the rest of the collection, or start again from the top.