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#11
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
wrote in message oups.com... Wow, I never knew that azimuth stability was such a problem with cassettes. Its a very major problem, exasperated by the low tape speed. How do you know how to adjust the azimuth - or how would a device know what the correct setting is? Is there some fail safe way to tell, or do you have to use your own ears? The best way to adjust azimuth is to have a mono test tape, and adjust the azimuth until tape heads tracking the top and bottom edges of the recorded track reproduce waves with identical timing. William's story about tape heads that split one of the tracks on the cassette is very believable. It turned every track into a mono track by having two narrow heads that split the track. The narrowness of each head would hurt its dynamic range, but summing them together to create an output signal would eliminate that problem. |
#12
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
I'd put my money on nulling based on minimizing the phase difference.
It is going to work well with less regard for program material HF content. You're almost certainly right. The operative adjective is "less" -- I've noticed that tapes without much HF content just don't want to "align". |
#13
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
William's story about tape heads that split one of the tracks on the
cassette is very believable. I checked the Dragon service manual and confirmed this is the way it works. However, if my life depended on explaining the details of the electronics, I'd be dead pretty quickly. |
#14
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
wrote:
Wow, I never knew that azimuth stability was such a problem with cassettes. Thanks so much for pointing that out. Azimuth stability and speed variations are the main reasons for the cassette being such a miserable format. Oh yes... and no reference tones for Dolby decoding either (although some early cassette machines did have the ability to lay down tones). How do you know how to adjust the azimuth - or how would a device know what the correct setting is? Is there some fail safe way to tell, or do you have to use your own ears? You have to use your own ears and peak for best high end. A scope can be very helpful for mono material but only a rough guide for stereo material. And the problem is that it drifts... the right angle at the beginning of the reel may be way off by the end of the reel. God, how I hate cassettes. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
#15
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
Mike Rivers wrote:
The automatic adjustment looks at phase difference between the channels and drives a motor which adjusts the head. In order to do this, though, it has two or more channels for each channel on the tape, so it can look at two halves of one track to determine the angular error. This makes the automatic azimuth machines electronically a good bit more complex. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
#16
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
William Sommerwerck wrote:
William's story about tape heads that split one of the tracks on the cassette is very believable. I checked the Dragon service manual and confirmed this is the way it works. However, if my life depended on explaining the details of the electronics, I'd be dead pretty quickly. I dunno if the Dragon uses the 4016 PLL chip as a discriminator, but that used to be a common way to do that sort of thing. The data sheet for the 4016 explains it all. And yes, the whole notion of PLL discriminator circuits came out of the WWII radar effort. Some of Norbert Weiner's math went into them, but lots of other guys helped. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
#17
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
On Aug 7, 7:03 pm, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote: In the Nakamichi, the outermost track (the one closest to the tape edge) is split into two head gaps, each with its own amplification. The head block is moved until the HF output of these heads peaks. (Or is it that the phase difference is minimized?) Anyhow... Anyhow . . . like I said, the phase. That's easier to detect (and closer to absolute) than the HF peak. |
#18
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
On Aug 7, 7:11 pm, "Arny Krueger" wrote:
The best way to adjust azimuth is to have a mono test tape, and adjust the azimuth until tape heads tracking the top and bottom edges of the recorded track reproduce waves with identical timing. That's the best way to adjust it to a standard, but the cassettes to be played may not have been recorded with the heads set to that standard. And the real problem is with instability of the tape relative to the head, both when recorded and again when played. For a "better than random" setup, making one adjustment before playing a tape is probably sufficient, but it should be done for each tape. |
#19
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
Scott Dorsey wrote:
It's a cheesy car-style transport that mounts in a computer. It is not a good way to get decent sound quality and it is not going to hold up to heavy use. Just go the Nak Dragon route. Your time will be radically saved because you won't be having to redo anything, and the azimuth control is automatic so you can do the work more or less unattended. Run it for a thousand hours and you might need to replace the heads but that's just a normal thing. Yoou do NOT use cleaner cassettes, you use the "Head, Red and Roll cleaner" from Precision Motor works or something similar and a swab. And you do it after every reel change. You can use 92% isopropanol in a pinch but it takes a lot more elbow grease. Don't waste your money on crap. Get a good deck either with manual or automatic azimuth control. --scott Indeed, the Dragon was an exceedingly high-end consumer machine. But it is expensive overkill for most people's old cassette collections. This is especially true for most commercially recorded cassettes, which were duplicated at high speed on tape stock that was run-of-the-mill or worse. Paul in San Francisco |
#20
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transferring cassettes to CD - Plusdeck 2C or other options
Paul MR wrote:
Indeed, the Dragon was an exceedingly high-end consumer machine. But it is expensive overkill for most people's old cassette collections. This is especially true for most commercially recorded cassettes, which were duplicated at high speed on tape stock that was run-of-the-mill or worse. The problem is that the high speed duplication tended to produce even worse azimuth wander, and too many of those bin duplicators were run by sloppy folks who were not careful about alignment. This, sadly, increases the expense on your end when you're trying to get decent sound out of the junk. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
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