IF you had a wide enough tape running fast enough and you calibrated the
kit on a regular basis and re spooled the tape every few months to avoid
ghosting and' it COULD, with a sacrifice of a virgin and a goat at
midnight, give a passable imitation of 'a recording device'.
Unless you added Dolby, in which case you needed three virgins and a
prayer to St. Bridget as well.
Only for the Russ Andrews supplied one Dolby line up for everyone
else
..
Can't say I agree.
Well since you were disagreeing with a straw man you yourself set up.
that's not surprising.
Did the BBC achieve miracles of recording with tape? Yes they did. They
had engineers who understood it.
Is the average analogue recording from a rock band so bad as to be in
places unusable? yes.
I remember standing behind a desk and saying to te 'sound engineer;''
'er the hi hats are totally overloading' and of course I could hear
that... because hi hats are sharp transient high frequencies which
tape does NOT like. 'No they aint' he said pointing at the VU meters
just tipping into the red...
Thats why they like tape, it can compress those very transients a
bit
..
I thought about telling him about short high frequency transients, high
frequency tape pre-emphasis, and the sort of averaging a VU meter does,
its needle inertia the like. Then I looked at him, thought better of it
and nodded' and left.
I remember being asked to set up a Nakamichi cassette recorder to give
the 'best possible' sound. Widely hailed as the best cassette recorder
ever made. I was completely unable to get a flat response beyond
2.5khz, and it was largely dead at 8khz, about -4dB more on on track
than the other irrespective.
I tried it on a variety of cassette brands and technologies. Each one
had a completely different frequency response and gain. Enough to make
using Dolby a complete joke.
IN the end I decided not to look at the meters and just got as much
treble as I could without being edgy, and made sure it gave an adequate
response to its owners favourite recordings. "Isn't it a piece of kit?"
he enthused.."Yes, it certainly is," I agreed and left hurriedly.
Now quite some years ago there was a recording engineer around called
Angus McKenzie who was excellent at his job, but sadly became blind at a
young age and like those who are missing one sense they seem to develop
the others more than most..
Anyways was at an audio exhibition for pro engineers and equipment
suppliers and on his stand he was demo'ing some of the recordings he had
done and one of them was of a small classical quartet. The audio was
actually off a Nak cassette machine and also off a Studer A80 or 800 odd
can't quite remember now but listening on Stax electrostatic phones you
could switch between them.
The Studer had Dolby SR fitted the Nak was IIRC using Dolby C but he had
set it all up very carefully as was his way of doing things. The
difference?, barely noticeable you had to really try to find any in fact
it was stunning to think that small cassette could almost compete with
15 IPS 1/4 tape..
Wonder if the one you experienced was duff in someway as I had one for a
while and as long as you like you say tweaked it all up as it should be
it was very good...
The Russ Andrews syndrome* we call it today I think.
;!)...
That people achieved miracles with it and with vinyl, is despite, not
because of its inherent qualities.
When you actually look at the amount of pre-emphasis applied, and the
amount of companding that Dolby did, you will realise that in the case
of anything short of professional studio machines you were already
'compressing' the data severely on a tape. Just in a different way.
That MP3 players (and CDs) wiped out cassette players in a few short
years tells you something. MP3 was better even at low bit rates than
Cassette.
And you only need to look at the pre-emphasis to see why. Cassettes may
have appeared to give you 100hz-8khz and 55dB S/N. But they certainly
did NOT have that dynamic range in the last couple of octaves.
You could do lossless comparison of audio and get data rates massively
down. And still be better than tape. CDS are not compressed not because
its gives a better sound, but because it makes the player cheaper. At
the time small CPUS capable of untangling a compressed digital stream
simply were not available - they had enough issues with the D to A
converters which were truly dire and led to the 'Vinyl sounds better
than CD' myth, that started as a fact but became a myth a few years later.
Actually the most difficult sound to compress without loss is the
audience applause that follows the concert.
I did spend 12 years or more designing professional audio kit. I stopped
at about the time digital recording came in because apart from the
actual loudspeakers, every other link in the chain was developed to the
point where it was essentially so good you really didn't need to try and
make it better.
And my name ain't Russ Andrews.
I should hope not;!...
That people have leveraged compression to try and squeeze more onto less
to the point where informations is lost does not mean that compressions
itself means loss of information that you wanted to hear.
And I stand by my statement that tape was, the worst possible recording
medium ever, except for all the alternatives available at that time.
*the more you pay the better it sounds, irrespective of what objective
tests tell you.
--
Tony Sayer