I’ve talked recently about the use of a timecode sync in home multitrack tape recording, and for this post I’m going to expand on that with an example recording, then a breakdown of exactly how the track was put together. Continue reading
I thought this would make for an interesting experiment. I’ve griped a little recently about expensive, pre-recorded cassettes, manufactured between the mid ‘eighties and mid ‘nineties, being produced with ferric tape formulations, as opposed to chrome. So I thought I’d assess exactly what customers were getting, in terms of sound quality, from these pre-recorded, CD-era ferric tapes. Continue reading
Most people with a major interest in tape recording will probably know a fair bit about Portastudios. But whatever your experience in this field, I bet there’s at least one thing in this collection of obscure facts that you didn’t know about the world of Tascam four-track tape machines… Continue reading
The answer was once obvious. Decades ago, people used compact cassettes because there was no other media upon which they could conveniently preserve sound at home, and because cassettes allowed pre-recorded matter to be played in places where the delicacy and static requirements of vinyl disc turntables were impractical. Continue reading
I can’t help feeling that I’ve been harsh with Memorex tapes over the course of this blog. The generation with which I had the most affinity (early ‘80s) were not well designed for the long term, and the high bias variants I used did not produce the sparkling trebles of their rivals. But in a recent test, I found that the actual tape contained in an early ‘80s Memorex MRXI (a normal bias Type I) acquitted itself very well sonically once the design flaws in the cassette were resolved. That prompted me to evaluate a later Memorex Type I… Continue reading
Yes, ‘tis the Clash of the Titans, as four old behemoths of analogue recording media slog it out for supremacy. Continue reading
Okay, so this is in no way a fair contest, but unfair usually makes for more interesting reading, so no apologies for that. In this post, I’m comparing the performance of four well-kept and barely used 60 minute audio tapes, made between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s. The idea was not to make a champion of a particular brand, but to explore how varied old audio cassettes can be in the way they handle a modern recording. Continue reading
