I received the following in an email from a person only identified as Ross. I thank him. He sent me the following in reference to this post. concerning Philips and PoziDriv screws as used on Nakamichi Dragons and other Japanese equipment. I, too, have a set of Hozen drivers which I obtained from www.escience.ca (more…)

I received a query from a gentleman in Europe about 1.875 in/s 4-track tapes. He was frustrated in finding a good machine for transferring them. Apparently, they have many of these tapes. Here are my suggestions.

Perhaps the easiest answer is to find a Studer-Revox C274 with low speed options. They were made.

Two other options. (more…)

A simple, 5-sided box solves two problems:
   –Protection of the Studer A80
   –Providing more work surface

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I spent days trying to get Shamrock 031 to play without much success. Since this is an Ampex factory budget brand (probably non-spec premium tape) I thought that it might be suffering from Sticky Shed Syndrome. I baked it for 12 hours and it still squealed. I then tried my usually successful cold playing technique and it still squealed. Cold playing has worked successfully with 3M 175 and Sony PR-150.

I was getting rather frustrated and since it was a four-track tape and one of the techniques that is supposed to reduce squeal is to play the tape faster, I dragged out my Racal Store 4DS instrumentation recorder which has a 75,000 Hz bandwidth at 15 in/s and played it at 15 in/s and digitized it at 88,200 samples per second. After slowing it down 4x and ending up with a 10 kHz bandwidth (which I subsequently truncated to 5 kHz since there was no useful information above that, but lots of noise–same as the non-squealing portion of the real-time transfers on a Studer A810).

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I received a query from Sweden today asking

I have a Studer machine with butterfly heads with which I’d like to reproduce
tapes recorded with normal two track heads. Theoretically, how much more noise,
in dB, would I get from playing the “empty” part of the tape? 

Let’s look at the assumptions.

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There are complex interactions between tape speed, track width, frequency response, and dynamic range. This article is an attempt to summarize the major influences. (more…)

I receive many tapes that use very creative methods of securing the end of tapes to reels. Some don’t do it at all. Most 1/4-inch tapes are secured as shown below. Sadly, the superior Zebra tape is no longer available. This is the traditional crepe-paper type of tape sold for the application. The picture below should explain all.

There is a recurring question as to what is the best way to set azimuth for playing a tape. Many people assume that using the test-tape alignment is best. Well, that makes another big assumption: The recorder used a proper test tape alignment. While that can be the case, it usually is not. (more…)

With budget limitations, it appears that oral histories are being recorded with little thought to their long-term preservation. While this appears to have been the case in the past as well, with purchasing agents buying the cheapest white-box tape that they could find, continuing this into the digital age needs to be reconsidered.

The cost savings in using bargain-basement digital speech recorders are offset by the labour required to reformat these files upon their receipt by an archive and also the fidelity of the recording suffers, and with fidelity, intelligibility also suffers.

DSS was an industry standard agreed upon by Olympus, Grundig, and Philips in 1994. (more…)

The question seems to regularly arise on mailing lists and chat rooms about Dolby and dbx plug-ins. I don’t think it will happen and I added that comment and some hopefully helpful operational hints to my noise-reduction page, here.