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Interesting tape copy job


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I was contacted by a lady who wanted "a 4 track tape" copied to CD. Assuming it was a reel, I said "sure!"

As it turned out it was a cassette made on one or another 4 track cassette machine. Oops!

Being game, I figured I'd try using my old Teac C3 machine. I dubbed tracks 1 & 3 into Reaper, then flipped the tape and dubbed tracks 2&4.

I then reversed the backwards tracks and started sorting out what was there. It was a live show of 6 or 7 songs.

As you might expect, the first pair of tracks soon drifted out of sync with the first pair. I chopped up the tracks into separate songs, then used stretch markers to hold sync with the reference track. Not easy! The only guide I had in a lot of places was minimizing the echo between the two. Unfortunately there was already quite a bit of echo from the venues back wall. In a bunch of other places it was just syncing up drum hits or guitar chords. A lot of work!

But ultimately I got it done. The lady was very happy with it and threw me a generous bonus for the job. It was her dead boyfriend's band, and that cassette was all she had of him...

Oh yes, I forgot: For some reason the recordist changed speeds 3 or 4 times in the space of those few songs. Where this happened I had to sketch a curve controlling playback rate, and try to match the change rate of the tape. Yikes...

I guess the upshot is that I got paid to learn a few new Reaper tricks.

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Good work. You can never rely on a cassette to play at the same speed twice, so that's why you had problems getting the pairs of tracks in sync. And it was further complicated because the beginninng of two of the tracks was at the beginning of the reel and the end of the other two tracks was at the beginning of the reel. If you had plenty of time to do the job, you probably could have found a 4-track Portastudio to borrow in order to transfer all the tracks in a single pass.

 

Odd about the speed changes - real speed changes, like between 1-7/8 ips and 3-3/4 ips? Or just random changes? The person manning the recorder may have started at 2x speed and then decided before the end of the show that he would run out of tape so he dropped to standard speed. Or maybe it was just a dirty pinch roller that was causing slippage.

 

Did you think to align the heads on your cassette deck to the tape before you made the transfer? Cassette head alignment is never very stable because there isn't much in the way of guiding. And did you figure out if there was noise reduction, and if so, decode it when making the transfer?

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The speed changes were from 3.75 IPS to 1.875 IPS and back. I could see maybe doing it once, between songs, but 3 times? Sheesh.

The C3 has an extremely stable head system. I've never needed to touch it other than cleaning & demag in the 40 years I've had this machine.

I couldn't audibly detect any Dolby or dbx NR. There were a few places where I used a plugin called ReaFIR to remove what sounded like instrument amp hum though.

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The C3 has an extremely stable head system. I've never needed to touch it other than cleaning & demag in the 40 years I've had this machine.

 

In a perfect world, heads should be aligned at the factory and stay that way for the life of the machine, but in practice, they don't. Some recorders are more stable than others, and as long as you always use the same deck for recording and playback, if your heads don't wander, you'll be fine. But you don't know where the heads were leaning on the deck that recorded that tape. Since you can't do anything to change the recorded tape, you need to match its head alignment or misalighment with the playback machine.

 

Opimizing the playback alignment to the recorded tape falls somewhere between essential and good practice when dealing with cassettes. This means changing the adjustment of the playback deck to see if the playback gets better or worse. With something different on each of the four tracks, you can't adjust for minimum phase shift between a pair of tracks, but you can optimise the high frequency response. And then, you use your standard alignment cassette to put your playback machine back to where it should be.

 

But. whatever works.

 

 

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Nice work getting around the limitations. When the speed is set to a different selection that's one thing, but yeah the drifting from one play of the tape to the next is one of those things forgotten in analog days. I still have an old Tascam 246 I bought new when they were making them. And a couple Dolby C NR modules around in case they used a Fostex product.

 

A lot of people have these old tapes now running at double-speed and 4-tracks. They can't make heads or tails of them (no pun) and sadly I've heard of people tossing them out. I'm the only one left in the area that has the machine, so I'm told. All it needs is a new rubber belt and new pinch roller every few years.

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I might have tried this if there were test tones on the tape. But, as it was, the the live tone nowhere near hi-fi; it was from 40 years ago, so very little bass below 70 Hz and very little true treble to work with; it was all pretty mid-rangy. Had to make a call on it, and decided it would be great deal of effort to squeeze an extra bit of fidelity from a cassette that old.

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The last job I had like this was from a guy who mixed Christian rock shows for 20 years. He gave me a box of reels he'd recorded over the years. A lot of time in baking the tapes, copying into the PC at 88.2khz (so I could change to proper sample rate for things recorded at 3 3/4ips), and sorting it all out.

Not something I'd want to do as a studio business... But I did get to find a great Phil Keaggy show, and the dude cut me a great deal on a mix console I bought from him.

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Yep, it's a lot of detective work and work in general when the tapes aren't labeled with speed and what kind of NR. The odd times I've come across old tapes that had tones before the songs and good labeling, but not often. I've always liked Phil Keaggy. I've seen him back in the day.

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