In message , michael
adams writes

wrote in message
...
On Monday, 28 August 2017 01:24:02 UTC+1, RJH wrote:
On 25/08/2017 15:59, David wrote:
O.K. - I know that most posters here are spade neck beards in disguise.

Clearing out a small portion of the loft I came across a Harman Kardon
cassette tape deck.

A quick punt through eBay suggests that they still sell for a bit and some
for surprisingly much.

Is this realistic or are eBayers 'avin a larf?


I'd check it works before spending whatever you might expect to get for
it - the rubber drive belts tend to perish.

and IME can usually be replaced with cheap stationery rubber bands &
work for years.

One minute its autoazimuths, and the next minute its cheap stationary
rubber bands.

Does the one compensate for the other, then ?

Poundland meets Russ Andrews !

Maybe he could start a chain of shops, called One Hundred Pound Land?

--
Ian

On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 13:34:31 +0100, Tim Streater wrote:

On 25/08/2017 15:59, David wrote:
O.K. - I know that most posters here are spade neck beards in
disguise.

What is a "spade neck beard"?

and WTF is a "hipster"?

And furthermore, WTF is Google?

And get off my danged lawn!!!

Bloody kids.

--
AMD FX-6300 in GA-990X-Gaming SLI-CF running Windows 7 Pro x64

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

On 30/08/17 13:34, Tim Streater wrote:
On 25/08/2017 15:59, David wrote:
O.K. - I know that most posters here are spade neck beards in
disguise.

What is a "spade neck beard"?

and WTF is a "hipster"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4n6OVoyYQ


--
The biggest threat to humanity comes from socialism, which has utterly
diverted our attention away from what really matters to our existential
survival, to indulging in navel gazing and faux moral investigations
into what the world ought to be, whilst we fail utterly to deal with
what it actually is.

On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 10:11:23 +0100, Andy Burns wrote:

Vir Campestris wrote:

Our current cassette deck is self calibrating. Put a tape in, and press
the button. It winds a bit into the tape, records a test pattern, winds
back, plays it to itself, and then has all the right bias etc.

My student-grant funded AIWA F770 did that in 198mumble, it's still in
the loft somewhere but no doubt would need a new set of belts before it
could be used now ...

It's a pretty safe bet that that will be the case if my Aiwa 3600 twin
capstan drive unit is anything to go by. :-(

Reading this post gave me the urge to satisfy curiosity and dig my own
Aiwa deck out of the cupboard to give it a quick check over. Sadly, it
turns out that the capstan drive belt, along with the counter/motion
detect drive belt have both snapped.

Initially, I couldn't even get it to fast wind in spite of the FF and REW
modes using a seperate motor/idler wheel drive system (which also acts to
provide the take up function via a slipping clutch which slips a bit too
much when it comes to fast winding - a minor irritation before the belts
melted into gloopy ghosts of their former selves).

I removed the cover to take a look at the mechanics of the deck and,
just as I discovered with my ancient Philips data cassette drive units
about ten years or so back (maybe even longer), the "rubber" drive belts
had decomposed into a horribly sticky gloop that's extremely difficult to
remove from surfaces, including skin if you make the mistake of trying to
grab "the broken ends" of what, at first sight, appears to be merely a
belt that snapped.

I dare say that replacement belts shouldn't be too difficult to source,
especially when you can substitute a square section belt running in V
grooved pulleys with a round section one. A flat dual capstan drive belt,
otoh, may prove a more problematical item to source a replacement for.
However, fitting the replacement belts (once you've acquired
replacements) is the easy part of the job. The hard part will be the
removal of the gloopy remains of the decomposed belts, a task not to be
dismissed lightly.

When you come to open that F770 up, resist temptation to dive straight
in to remove the rotted belts without an array of tweezers and cotton bud
sticks to wrangle as much of "the merely snapped ends" of the belts
without causing too much contamination of the drive mechanism and
fingers. The gloopy mess that remains is severely sticky; a sort of cross
between freshly squeezed Evo-stick and warm bitumen.

As for that 3600 of mine, I'm not even going to look for spares. I've
reassembled it and put it back in the cupboard. I don't have any cassette
tapes that weren't dubbed from R2R in the first place and, afaicr, I've
already digitised the few recordings that existed only on cassette by the
time I came to digitise them. Sadly, I don't see much point in fixing it
up.

--
Johnny B Good

On 30/08/2017 19:30, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 10:11:23 +0100, Andy Burns wrote:

Vir Campestris wrote:

Our current cassette deck is self calibrating. Put a tape in, and press
the button. It winds a bit into the tape, records a test pattern, winds
back, plays it to itself, and then has all the right bias etc.

My student-grant funded AIWA F770 did that in 198mumble, it's still in
the loft somewhere but no doubt would need a new set of belts before it
could be used now ...

It's a pretty safe bet that that will be the case if my Aiwa 3600 twin
capstan drive unit is anything to go by. :-(

Reading this post gave me the urge to satisfy curiosity and dig my own
Aiwa deck out of the cupboard to give it a quick check over. Sadly, it
turns out that the capstan drive belt, along with the counter/motion
detect drive belt have both snapped.

Initially, I couldn't even get it to fast wind in spite of the FF and REW
modes using a seperate motor/idler wheel drive system (which also acts to
provide the take up function via a slipping clutch which slips a bit too
much when it comes to fast winding - a minor irritation before the belts
melted into gloopy ghosts of their former selves).

I removed the cover to take a look at the mechanics of the deck and,
just as I discovered with my ancient Philips data cassette drive units
about ten years or so back (maybe even longer), the "rubber" drive belts
had decomposed into a horribly sticky gloop that's extremely difficult to
remove from surfaces, including skin if you make the mistake of trying to
grab "the broken ends" of what, at first sight, appears to be merely a
belt that snapped.

I dare say that replacement belts shouldn't be too difficult to source,
especially when you can substitute a square section belt running in V
grooved pulleys with a round section one. A flat dual capstan drive belt,
otoh, may prove a more problematical item to source a replacement for.
However, fitting the replacement belts (once you've acquired
replacements) is the easy part of the job.

Yes - there seem to be a few suppliers on ebay that have taken the
trouble to source the spec of a large number of decks and sell drive
bands that should fit. For a price, of course!

The hard part will be the
removal of the gloopy remains of the decomposed belts, a task not to be
dismissed lightly.


I don't mind that part - it's the disassembly that I find tricky. I did
a Technics top of range a while back, and that took some hours. And I
have a Sony three head deck here waiting to be done - the pretty good
manual and online tutorials seem to suggest something similar, with some
circlips (not sure my pliers will fit something so small, wait and see).

My other cassette deck - a Denon mid-range direct drive - does still
work very well indeed. I've had it 20 years, so there's a moral there
somewhere. I'd loosely assume there are no belts at all - but I've not
taken the trouble to check.

All of that said, I rarely use it - maybe every couple of months and an
old Peel Festive 50. happy days :-)

--
Cheers, Rob

On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 20:34:55 +0100, RJH wrote:

On 30/08/2017 19:30, Johnny B Good wrote:

====snip====


The hard part will be the
removal of the gloopy remains of the decomposed belts, a task not to be
dismissed lightly.


I don't mind that part - it's the disassembly that I find tricky. I did
a Technics top of range a while back, and that took some hours. And I
have a Sony three head deck here waiting to be done - the pretty good
manual and online tutorials seem to suggest something similar, with some
circlips (not sure my pliers will fit something so small, wait and see).

I usually see if I can cheat a little by just slackening off bearing
mounts to create the necessary gap to slip the new belt into the works.
Not always possible but worth a try.


My other cassette deck - a Denon mid-range direct drive - does still
work very well indeed. I've had it 20 years, so there's a moral there
somewhere. I'd loosely assume there are no belts at all - but I've not
taken the trouble to check.

There may be a small belt to drive the counter which may also be the
method to drive a motion/end of tape detector as is the case with that
3600 deck.


All of that said, I rarely use it - maybe every couple of months and an
old Peel Festive 50. happy days :-)

Apropos of direct drive, I have a couple of Akai R2R decks, a GX630DB
and a GX747, both direct drive models. However, both rely on a small
drive belt for their tape counters.

The earlier GX630DB uses a simple 4 digit odometer driven from one of
the reel table hubs to provide some sort of indication of where to wind
to to get near to the start of a desired track. All things considered, it
doesn't do too bad a job usually being within a couple of percent of the
originally noted counts.

The newer GX747 otoh, egregiously resorts to the totally pointless use
of a drive belt to transfer the motion from one of the two anti-flutter
wheels (it's a 6 head bi-directional auto-reversing deck) to a seperate
shaft which drives an optical sensing wheel which generates counting
pulses and a signal to indicate direction which drives an electronic
counter calibrated in hours minutes and seconds (possibly switchable to
indicate metres or feet - it's been a good 25 years since I last packed
it away into its box).

The egregious part of this is that the optical disk sensor could so
easily have been mounted directly onto the anti-flutter roller spindle in
place of the pulley which would have not only saved the needless cost of
a second pulley and a rubber band but would also have eliminated the
extra drag and tape to roller slippage on top of the additional slippage
in the rubber band drive itself.

Ghod alone knows why Akai decided to splurge additional *dollars* on
unnecessary and counter-productive components when previously they had
done a similar dis-service to the GX630DB's Dolby NR boards where, for
the sake of *a few cent's worth* of two resistors and a capacitor per
channel (2 encoder and 2 decoder circuits), they totally destroyed the
record and replay amplification chain's maximum headroom to the point
that the replay clipped at a mere +8dB, clipping pre-recorded High output
tapes with +12 to +15 dB levels and (unnoticed by the reviewer who had
picked up on the replay issue) likewise clipped bass content going
through the recording amp.

Thankfully, I was able to spot Akai's skoolboy howler when I examined
the circuit diagrams in the service manual I had ordered straight after
purchasing the deck. It was a most satisfying moment in my life to
discover about a year later when I read a Wireless World article on
building Dolby noise reduction boards that the extra components I'd added
to correct the mis-biassing of the emitter follower output stage made the
circuit match the official Dolby NR circuit exactly! :-)

Since this emitter follower stage directly drove the line output, I
beefed up its negative pull down drive capability by replacing the simple
emitter resistor with a constant current source so as to stave off
asymmetric clipping into the typical 10K minimum line input loads taking
the minimum load impedance down to 3k3 ohms before the risk of asymmetric
clipping could once more arise.

I didn't need to do this with the encoder boards which sat between the
bass boost EQ and HF boost EQ sections of the recording amp since the
emitter follower was driving a fixed Hi-Z input stage. These
modifications to the Dolby replay decoder took the replay clipping level
to +18dB, nicely in excess of all but the most horrendously over-driven
into saturation recordings on high output tapes. IOW, I'd be suffering
gross tape distortion long before replay amp clipping distortion would
start creeping into the picture - just as it should be with *any*
analogue tape replay system no matter how humble its specification.

I can only conclude that the bean counters at Akai inc must have
literally put a gun to the head of the chief designer to force that
performance destroying penny pinching on what was an otherwise state of
the art example of analogue magnetic recording technology.

Anyway, those criticisms aside, the possible issue of drive belt rot
with the GX630DB isn't really a biggie since it only effects a primitive
tape counter whose function can be replaced by the markings on many of
the plastic reels for this purpose where, in any case, the MK 1 eyeball
can effectively gauge the situation even without such reel markings.

The GX747 otoh is a different kettle of fish since, at the very least
you lose a moderately accurate (to within a few seconds end to end of a 3
1/2 hour tape but which could be so much better again) tape position
indicator which can be preset to a value other than zero when the
occasion demands. A failure that could so easily have been rendered
impossible if Akai's designers hadn't had their collective heads so far
up their feckin' collective backsides when designing this otherwise
excellent deck.

In neither case is the counter used to drive a motion/stopped tape
detection circuit as is typically the case with most cassette decks,
relying as both do, on a seperate drop arm held up by tape tension.
Indeed, the reversomatic GX747 has additional sensing contacts to detect
optional end of tape foils between tape and leaders so as to effect the
reversal before the tape becomes unthreaded from the reel.

I've just checked the GX630DB's tape counter (it's driven from the
supply reel) and it appears to still be functioning ok. Unfortunately, in
the case of the GX747, I'd have to retrieve it from the top of our fitted
wardrobe, unpack it and plug it into a mains socket before I can thread a
tape in order to test the counter.

Since I have no immediate plans to press the 747 back into service (it
lacks any form of noise reduction circuitry which is both a good and a
bad thing - bad because I'd have to buy or make up my own Dolby boards to
replay my existing recordings but good because there were no Dolby boards
for Akai to **** up in the first place), I'll leave it to fester in its
original packaging for most likely forever or until I get an offer I
can't refuse.

Even if the drive belt is still intact by then, I'd recommend that the
new owner relocates the optical wheel directly onto the ant-flutter wheel
spindle and use a Rasberry-Pi to deal with the change of pulse rate that
such a mod would create (no such things as R-Pis back in the day when I
first contemplated this modification shortly after its purchase). This
would solve the rotted drive belt risk issue at a stroke and improve
accuracy by at least an order of magnitude, particularly so in the case
of fast rewinding after playing through a whole reel of tape.

I really only need to keep the GX630DB going so I can resume digitising
the rest of my tape collection when I finally get another round Tuit. I
might even resurrect an old skool PC with the required 16 bit ISA slot to
press my rather excellent and expensive AWE 64 Gold card back into
service just for this work. 16 bit 44.1KHz sample rate is way in excess
of requirements for even the best of these recordings (and don't let
others persuade you that it's otherwise).

TBH, a half decent USB ADC/DAC adapter should serve just as well, if not
better, and the use of 48KHz sampling rate also wouldn't come amiss. It's
a fairly trivial task to resample down to the 44.1KHz CD sampling rate
standard if you wish to distribute anything in this legacy format so it
might be a wise move. There's absolutely no benefit in digitising to
96/192KHz 24/32bit, those rates and bit depths are best left to
multichannel mixing down to whatever final digital format is called for.

Expressing the dynamic range performance of tape recordings in digital
terms[1] gives us 9 bits for cassette at best with 5 to 6 bits being more
typical and 13 bits for best analogue R2R (with advanced noise
reduction). Digitising legacy analogue collections (with perhaps the
exception of DBX encoded tape and vinyl) doesn't require anything more
than a half decent 16 bit soundcard to capture the recordings with ample
headroom to spare.

[1] https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml mentioned at the 11 minute mark.

--
Johnny B Good

On 31/08/2017 04:25, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 20:34:55 +0100, RJH wrote:

On 30/08/2017 19:30, Johnny B Good wrote:

====snip====


The hard part will be the
removal of the gloopy remains of the decomposed belts, a task not to be
dismissed lightly.


I don't mind that part - it's the disassembly that I find tricky. I did
a Technics top of range a while back, and that took some hours. And I
have a Sony three head deck here waiting to be done - the pretty good
manual and online tutorials seem to suggest something similar, with some
circlips (not sure my pliers will fit something so small, wait and see).

I usually see if I can cheat a little by just slackening off bearing
mounts to create the necessary gap to slip the new belt into the works.
Not always possible but worth a try.


My other cassette deck - a Denon mid-range direct drive - does still
work very well indeed. I've had it 20 years, so there's a moral there
somewhere. I'd loosely assume there are no belts at all - but I've not
taken the trouble to check.

There may be a small belt to drive the counter which may also be the
method to drive a motion/end of tape detector as is the case with that
3600 deck.


All of that said, I rarely use it - maybe every couple of months and an
old Peel Festive 50. happy days :-)

Apropos of direct drive, I have a couple of Akai R2R decks, a GX630DB
and a GX747, both direct drive models. However, both rely on a small
drive belt for their tape counters.


Snip detail - you've been through the tape mill!

TBH, a half decent USB ADC/DAC adapter should serve just as well, if not
better, and the use of 48KHz sampling rate also wouldn't come amiss. It's
a fairly trivial task to resample down to the 44.1KHz CD sampling rate
standard if you wish to distribute anything in this legacy format so it
might be a wise move. There's absolutely no benefit in digitising to
96/192KHz 24/32bit, those rates and bit depths are best left to
multichannel mixing down to whatever final digital format is called for.


I'd recently bought a rack mount Marantz (PMD560, £30ish on ebay) which
is great to use - meter and manual controls. But maximum 16/48 PCM
recording. It was suggested on the uk.rec.audio NG that 24 bit might be
better for the initial recording, then convert down to 16/44, for
digitising vinyl and cassette.


Expressing the dynamic range performance of tape recordings in digital
terms[1] gives us 9 bits for cassette at best with 5 to 6 bits being more
typical and 13 bits for best analogue R2R (with advanced noise
reduction). Digitising legacy analogue collections (with perhaps the
exception of DBX encoded tape and vinyl) doesn't require anything more
than a half decent 16 bit soundcard to capture the recordings with ample
headroom to spare.


I don't tend to listen that intently, or at high volumes, any more to
the point that I find decent cassette recordings and vinyl generally
pretty good. And, because of the nature of the recording and some other
weird variables, sometimes better - especially vinyl.

[1] https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml mentioned at the 11 minute mark.


I like that bloke's videos - he communicates it all well for a non-tech
like me.

--
Cheers, Rob

On 31/08/17 04:25, Johnny B Good wrote:

Expressing the dynamic range performance of tape recordings in digital
terms[1] gives us 9 bits for cassette at best with 5 to 6 bits being more
typical and 13 bits for best analogue R2R (with advanced noise
reduction).

Well most cassette tape machines would do 40dB range at a minimum -
thats 7 bits, and 50db is more usual which is around the 9 bit mark.

I forget what a top quality studio R2R on 1" tape would do, but Im
guessing up around 80-90dB which is getting on for 16 bit.


Digitising legacy analogue collections (with perhaps the
exception of DBX encoded tape and vinyl) doesn't require anything more
than a half decent 16 bit soundcard to capture the recordings with ample
headroom to spare.


That I agree with 100%.


--
€œIt is hard to imagine a more stupid decision or more dangerous way of
making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people
who pay no price for being wrong.€�

Thomas Sowell

On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 07:46:29 +0100, RJH wrote:

On 31/08/2017 04:25, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 20:34:55 +0100, RJH wrote:

On 30/08/2017 19:30, Johnny B Good wrote:

====snip====


The hard part will be the
removal of the gloopy remains of the decomposed belts, a task not to
be dismissed lightly.


I don't mind that part - it's the disassembly that I find tricky. I
did a Technics top of range a while back, and that took some hours.
And I have a Sony three head deck here waiting to be done - the pretty
good manual and online tutorials seem to suggest something similar,
with some circlips (not sure my pliers will fit something so small,
wait and see).

I usually see if I can cheat a little by just slackening off bearing
mounts to create the necessary gap to slip the new belt into the works.
Not always possible but worth a try.


My other cassette deck - a Denon mid-range direct drive - does still
work very well indeed. I've had it 20 years, so there's a moral there
somewhere. I'd loosely assume there are no belts at all - but I've not
taken the trouble to check.

There may be a small belt to drive the counter which may also be the
method to drive a motion/end of tape detector as is the case with that
3600 deck.


All of that said, I rarely use it - maybe every couple of months and
an old Peel Festive 50. happy days :-)

Apropos of direct drive, I have a couple of Akai R2R decks, a GX630DB
and a GX747, both direct drive models. However, both rely on a small
drive belt for their tape counters.


Snip detail - you've been through the tape mill!

There used to be a time, back in the late 70s, early 80s, when an
understanding of analogue magnetic recording was worth having. With the
advent of cheap digital recording kit, other than for maintaining such
kit in order to digitise legacy material before the original media
crumbles into dust, such knowledge becomes just a matter of mere
historical academic interest.

Aside from the need to digitise an existing tape or vinyl collection,
running such venerable kit, no matter how excellent it might be in its
class, is really more a matter of satisfying a nostalgia trip in its most
tangible form, an actual re-living of the original experience! :-)

Also, of course, there's the issue of hearing just how close to "Audio
Perfection" it was possible to reach using purely analogue means before
we were able to 'cheat' using digital processing to more perfectly
capture the audio waveforms that comprise a musical performance.

Since the 'musical experience' of most of us "Oldies" has largely
consisted of vinyl and radio broadcasts rather than live performances, it
can be counterproductive to the nostalgic experience to "Clean Up" a tape
dub of a borrowed album 'just because you can'. Those pops and clicks
(and even bursts of white noise and distortion where the original owner
may have pressed the tone arm onto the record to stop it skipping on his
Dansette record player) can often become an embedded part of your
original experience which, if removed, would be perceived as a 'loss of
fidelity' to that experience.

The stark truth of the matter with regard to even high quality tape
decks such as those Akai units, coupled with high quality Japanese
manufactured R2R tapes (American and European tape manufacturers couldn't
hold a candle to the likes of Maxell and TDK when it came to quality),
was that it didn't make much sense to keep using them to record new
material. Digital recording devices, including that vintage (12 years old
for Gawd's sake! :-) ) PMD560 can more perfectly capture new audio
sources so much more conveniently. Besides which, there's the cost and
availability of Japanese high quality R2R tape to consider if you've
consumed all your stock of unused tape as most R2R tape deck owners will
have done long since by now.

Most (but not all) of the younger (20 and 30 somethings) generation of
"Hi-Fi Enthusiasts" would regard my continued ownership of such 'vintage'
audio kit as a pointless obsession. The few that see beyond this, are the
ones that desire a better understanding of how things *actually* work.

Thankfully, there will always be a small proportion of any one
generation that never lose their scientific curiosity of the world around
them from the moment of their birth. We've all started off as practical
scientists from birth - how else do you think we *all* learnt to
integrate the stream of visual data with the stream of aural, touch,
taste and smell sensations into our own personal VR suite (aka, "The
Visual Cortex") which represents the working model of the world we have
been born into and are obliged to interact with if we wish to survive
long enough to procreate and give the next generation a chance to enjoy
the same experience? :-)

The bottom line to the comments raised by the OP's original question,
regarding the value or worth of a vintage "Hi-Fi Cassette
Deck" (venerable or not) is that it depends on whether there are enough
people with an interest in owning and using such kit to generate a demand
by which to apply the "Supply and Demand" equation to. Regardless of what
you, the OP or I think, there will almost certainly be some people with
their own legitimate need to own and operate such kit.

Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people so can't offer a valuation
suggestion. All I'd suggest is that the OP researches the market and try
a 'Suck it and see' approach. Discussing the merits or otherwise of a
cassette deck, quite frankly, seems to be beside the point when even the
best quality R2R tape decks of the day, using high quality Japanese tapes
still fall short of the "Hi-Fi Ideal".


TBH, a half decent USB ADC/DAC adapter should serve just as well, if
not
better, and the use of 48KHz sampling rate also wouldn't come amiss.
It's a fairly trivial task to resample down to the 44.1KHz CD sampling
rate standard if you wish to distribute anything in this legacy format
so it might be a wise move. There's absolutely no benefit in digitising
to 96/192KHz 24/32bit, those rates and bit depths are best left to
multichannel mixing down to whatever final digital format is called
for.


I'd recently bought a rack mount Marantz (PMD560, £30ish on ebay) which
is great to use - meter and manual controls. But maximum 16/48 PCM
recording. It was suggested on the uk.rec.audio NG that 24 bit might be
better for the initial recording, then convert down to 16/44, for
digitising vinyl and cassette.

JOOI, I googled the model number and read through a PDF of the user
guide, noting a "Printed in Japan" date of 2005/12 at the bottom of the
last page which suggests an approximate product age of 12 years. The use
of CF cards seems anachronistic even way back then. Fortunately, even the
most expensive 4GB CF card (Argos, who else?) is a mere 25 quid which
will almost certainly be cheaper than a 10 inch 3600 foot reel of Maxell
UD35 tape (namely, Maxell UD 35-180B). Actually, after looking on Amazon,
Argos are far from being the most expensive. There's one hell of a wide
variation in the price of 4GB CF cards which ranges from as little as
£8.25 (Ebay) to a high of £69.99 (Amazon). Mind you, buying flash media
from almost any Ebay trader is at best a risky business.

Just on a hunch, I googled "cf card to sd card adapter" and found plenty
of hits so you can even avoid the CF card price premium using a cheap
adapter (99p to a high of £7.35, both Ebay). That 30 quidish spend seems
to have been a good investment. :-)



Expressing the dynamic range performance of tape recordings in
digital
terms[1] gives us 9 bits for cassette at best with 5 to 6 bits being
more typical and 13 bits for best analogue R2R (with advanced noise
reduction). Digitising legacy analogue collections (with perhaps the
exception of DBX encoded tape and vinyl) doesn't require anything more
than a half decent 16 bit soundcard to capture the recordings with
ample headroom to spare.


I don't tend to listen that intently, or at high volumes, any more to
the point that I find decent cassette recordings and vinyl generally
pretty good. And, because of the nature of the recording and some other
weird variables, sometimes better - especially vinyl.

It's been many years since I last auditioned vinyl and R2R recordings
directly other than when I was digitising them. Most of what little
listening I've been doing during the past decade or so has been through
my office desktop speakers, typically my own MP3 renditions of the wav
files captured from the tapes and vinyl that I've processed so far.

Since the front room adjacent to the living room (I suppose what might
best be described as the front parlour) has recently enjoyed a bit of a
decluttering, I think it's now high time for me to commandeer it as my
own personal auditorium before the missus claims it for herself.

Since she long ago claimed the living room as her personal space by
instigating a radical remodelling some years ago, I stand a very good
chance of setting up some sort of Hi-Fi setup where I can listen once
more to my eclectic music collection on real full size speakers and in
rather more comfort than an office chair. I just have to get off my
backside and get it all sorted out.

Unfortunately, that means finishing off the rewiring job from several
years ago where I left a small loop of 2.5mm FT&E ready for me to add an
additional double socket I was planning on when I rearranged the existing
downstairs ring main to add more sockets to the living room.

I just need to dig out a rectangle from the plaster to take a twin
outlet backbox, chop the cable, fit said backbox and terminate the wiring
onto the new socket terminals. I didn't do it at the time since it wasn't
massively urgent and I'd had enough of fitting the extra sockets in the
living room by then which had been the primary purpose of the rewire. At
that point, with the cable already in place, it seemed like an opportune
moment to take respite from the rewiring exercise. It didn't occur to me
that what was expected to be just a few day's hiatus in completing the
job would turn into a 2 or 3 year 'sabatical'. :-) Mind you, it did help
that this loop of cable was well hidden from sight by the presence of a
nice chunky leather armchair.

If I do manage to take over the front parlour, I might even have a go at
refurbishing that Aiwa 3600 deck. I'm almost certain I have its service
manual somewhere in the house - it was certainly of a quality sufficient
to justify the expense of such a luxury so I'd be very surprised if I
hadn't purchased the service manual straight after buying the deck just
as I had in the case of the GX747 purchased around the same time.


[1] https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml mentioned at the 11 minute
mark.


I like that bloke's videos - he communicates it all well for a non-tech
like me.

His videos are such a joy to watch that I often find myself watching
them in full after revisiting them just to grab a link to post in a usenet
reply even though I must have seem them at least 3 or 4 times already. :-)

--
Johnny B Good

On Thursday, 31 August 2017 21:48:30 UTC+1, Johnny B Good wrote:

Since the 'musical experience' of most of us "Oldies" has largely
consisted of vinyl and radio broadcasts rather than live performances, it
can be counterproductive to the nostalgic experience to "Clean Up" a tape
dub of a borrowed album 'just because you can'. Those pops and clicks
(and even bursts of white noise and distortion where the original owner
may have pressed the tone arm onto the record to stop it skipping on his
Dansette record player) can often become an embedded part of your
original experience which, if removed, would be perceived as a 'loss of
fidelity' to that experience.

I sincerely hope no-one has ever been miserable enough to try to record off a Dansette any time in the last 50 years.


NT

On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 17:43:04 -0700, tabbypurr wrote:

On Thursday, 31 August 2017 21:48:30 UTC+1, Johnny B Good wrote:

Since the 'musical experience' of most of us "Oldies" has largely
consisted of vinyl and radio broadcasts rather than live performances,
it can be counterproductive to the nostalgic experience to "Clean Up" a
tape dub of a borrowed album 'just because you can'. Those pops and
clicks (and even bursts of white noise and distortion where the
original owner may have pressed the tone arm onto the record to stop it
skipping on his Dansette record player) can often become an embedded
part of your original experience which, if removed, would be perceived
as a 'loss of fidelity' to that experience.

I sincerely hope no-one has ever been miserable enough to try to record
off a Dansette any time in the last 50 years.

I was merely offering a likely scenario to account for the abuse meted
out to a borrowed Beatles LP (Revolver, IIRC) by a previous owner. The
lowest quality of record deck I ever used was a Garrard SP25 with,
initially, a cheap ceramic cartridge driving the mic input on a Philips
portable R2R tape recorder via 1M ohm resistors to down-mix into mono.

I think I was using a GL75 deck/arm/cart setup with an Akai 4000D by the
time I was recording that Beatles Album some time around 1967.

--
Johnny B Good

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 17:43:04 -0700, tabbypurr wrote:


I sincerely hope no-one has ever been miserable enough to try to record
off a Dansette any time in the last 50 years.

NT


I was merely offering a likely scenario to account for the abuse meted
out to a borrowed Beatles LP (Revolver, IIRC) by a previous owner.

Whereas formerly -

wrote in message
...

On Monday, 28 August 2017 01:24:02 UTC+1, RJH wrote:

I'd check it works before spending whatever you might expect to get for
it - the rubber drive belts tend to perish.

and IME can usually be replaced with cheap stationery rubber bands
& work for years.


NT



He's the kind of guy
Who never used to cry
The world is treating him bad, misery
He's lost her now for sure
After trying cheap elastic bands
It's going to be a drag, misery

Lyrics courtesy,
John Lennon, Paul MacCartney, and Russ Poundland.



michael adams


....

compression is now more than possible its about time we simply used mp3 etc
for spoken word and music got a better treatment. In a way I suppose MP3 is
the cassette quality media of today.
It is audible as phase flutter, grittiness and in some cases both!
Brian

I think you must be running MP3 at its default 128kbits which is why it's very rough, suitable only for audio books. 192 or 256 kbits give a marked improvement.

On Thursday, August 31, 2017 at 4:26:00 AM UTC+1, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 20:34:55 +0100, RJH wrote:

On 30/08/2017 19:30, Johnny B Good wrote:

it away into its box).



Ghod alone knows why Akai decided to splurge additional *dollars* on
unnecessary and counter-productive components when previously they had
done a similar dis-service to the GX630DB's Dolby NR boards where, for
the sake
[1] https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml mentioned at the 11 minute mark.


I also recall problems with eccentric Akai circuits. A stereo/mono switch on an FM tuner that connected together the emitters of two emitter followers in the R & L channel outputs. Hate to think how that distorted the difference signal. Long tailed pair?.
More interestingly, a UHF preamp where the board's earth was connected to the neutral of the mains supply. OK until the mains was wired the wrong way.
Both of these were like first year student errors.

In article ,
therustyone wrote:
I also recall problems with eccentric Akai circuits. A stereo/mono
switch on an FM tuner that connected together the emitters of two
emitter followers in the R & L channel outputs. Hate to think how that
distorted the difference signal. Long tailed pair?. More interestingly,
a UHF preamp where the board's earth was connected to the neutral of the
mains supply. OK until the mains was wired the wrong way. Both of these
were like first year student errors.

Remember a pal buying a separates Pioneer system. Not the most expensive
on the market, but not cheap either. Every single unit had the mains earth
connected to chassis. I suppose to conform to UK regs. Ordinary phono
connectors with screens also connected to chassis. And didn't it hum...

--
*Happiness is seeing your mother-in-law on a milk carton

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On 01/09/17 22:44, therustyone wrote:
On Thursday, August 31, 2017 at 4:26:00 AM UTC+1, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 20:34:55 +0100, RJH wrote:

On 30/08/2017 19:30, Johnny B Good wrote:

it away into its box).



Ghod alone knows why Akai decided to splurge additional *dollars* on
unnecessary and counter-productive components when previously they had
done a similar dis-service to the GX630DB's Dolby NR boards where, for
the sake
[1] https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml mentioned at the 11 minute mark.


I also recall problems with eccentric Akai circuits. A stereo/mono switch on an FM tuner that connected together the emitters of two emitter followers in the R & L channel outputs. Hate to think how that distorted the difference signal. Long tailed pair?.
More interestingly, a UHF preamp where the board's earth was connected to the neutral of the mains supply. OK until the mains was wired the wrong way.
Both of these were like first year student errors.


I'll toss in a philips tuner head for FM where

(a) the voltage stabilation for the caricap tuning capacaitor was a raw
zener diode, one of the best noise sources known to man.

(b) the ocsillator was tuned by a ferrite slug absolutely acting as a
magnmetic hum field detector and amplifying it.

More recentkly. Barclays has moved its well oiled and functional
stockbroking platform to a new 'smart investor' platform which is so
dysfunctional that everyone is saying that the smart investors are all
closing thier accounts - or would if they caoul actually access the web
site - and moving their business elsewhere.

'Not even alpha' as they say.


--
€œA leader is best When people barely know he exists. Of a good leader,
who talks little,When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,They will say,
€œWe did this ourselves.€�

ۥ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

"Tjoepstil" wrote in message
news
On 25/08/17 17:35, michael adams wrote:
"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
news
On 25/08/17 17:05, Graham. wrote:
On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 16:13:15 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 25/08/17 16:05, David wrote:
On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 14:59:25 +0000, David wrote:

O.K. - I know that most posters here are spade neck beards in disguise.

Clearing out a small portion of the loft I came across a Harman Kardon
cassette tape deck.

A quick punt through eBay suggests that they still sell for a bit and
some for surprisingly much.

Is this realistic or are eBayers 'avin a larf?


The deck is an HK2000 which seems to have reasonable reviews including a
posting in
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thread...umer-cassette-
tape-
deck-ever-produced.647334/page-2

http://www.thevintageknob.org/harman_kardon-HK2000.html





I ran tests on a top end Nakamichi once. Even after two days tweaking I
could never get left and right channels to behave the same and both were
enough to make a maiden blush.

I concluded that 'cassette' and 'hi fi' didnt belong in the same sentence.

Worse still, a forum poster has put "cassette" and "studio quality"
together.

Well as my later post pointed out 'stuidio quality' is only as good as the sound
engineer

It's also only as good as the width of the tape. The fact that Dolby sound
reduction was very effective on 1/4, and 1/2. studio tape which was
why it was widely adopted, and rather less effective but still an improvement
on 1/8 inch cassette tape, appears to have totally escaped you.

no, its so obvious I cant believe you think anyone doesn'tt know that.
Especially tnp

dork

I'm sorry "Tjoepstil" , you've got me a bit confused here.

Just recently you've admitted that "Tjoepstil" and "the Natural Philospher"
are the same person. You. They're both nyms you use on your two computers
"Tjoepstil" on your laptop and "The Natural Philosopher" on your desktop.

The only difference being that you only post as "Tjoepstil" from the laptop in
your bedroom.

But just there you referred to "tnp" in the third person, in support of what
"The Natural Philospher" had just posted. Can you see ?

Where you posted - "Especially tnp"

As though "tnp" and you are two different people.

Did you get a bit confused and think you were still in the living room
posting on the desktop at the same time as you were in the bedroom
posting on the laptop ?

michael adams




"Used by the [...[Government in the form proposed, the referendum
is a tactical device to get over a split in their own party, and
any constitutional consequences are, therefore, of only
secondary importance in the Government's eyes."

Margaret Thatcher 1975

....




....

michael adams wrote:

you've admitted that "Tjoepstil" and "the Natural Philospher"
are the same person. You. They're both nyms you use on your two computers
"Tjoepstil" on your laptop and "The Natural Philosopher" on your desktop.

By comparing the messages from both, clearly the laptop keyboard is
easier to type on, except that it has a broken shift key ...

On 22/10/17 16:00, Andy Burns wrote:
michael adams wrote:

you've admitted that "Tjoepstil" and "theÂ* Natural Philospher"
are the same person. You. They're both nyms you use on your two computers
"Tjoepstil" on your laptop and "The Natural Philosopher" on your desktop.

By comparing the messages from both, clearly the laptop keyboard is
easier to type on, except that it has a broken shift key ...

Not quite true, but the athritis makes it hard to reach that when using
the mouse pad.


--
You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a
kind word alone.

Al Capone

On Sunday, 22 October 2017 17:49:15 UTC+1, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 22/10/17 16:00, Andy Burns wrote:
michael adams wrote:

you've admitted that "Tjoepstil" and "theÂ* Natural Philospher"
are the same person. You. They're both nyms you use on your two computers
"Tjoepstil" on your laptop and "The Natural Philosopher" on your desktop.

By comparing the messages from both, clearly the laptop keyboard is
easier to type on, except that it has a broken shift key ...

Not quite true, but the athritis makes it hard to reach that when using
the mouse pad.

Nah it can't be anything that simple, must be a giant conspiracy involving a whole network of people for entirely unknown but nonetheless nefarious reasons. Welcome to Michael's World, mind the fairies.

On 22/10/17 18:21, wrote:
On Sunday, 22 October 2017 17:49:15 UTC+1, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 22/10/17 16:00, Andy Burns wrote:
michael adams wrote:

you've admitted that "Tjoepstil" and "theÂ* Natural Philospher"
are the same person. You. They're both nyms you use on your two computers
"Tjoepstil" on your laptop and "The Natural Philosopher" on your desktop.

By comparing the messages from both, clearly the laptop keyboard is
easier to type on, except that it has a broken shift key ...

Not quite true, but the athritis makes it hard to reach that when using
the mouse pad.

Nah it can't be anything that simple, must be a giant conspiracy involving a whole network of people for entirely unknown but nonetheless nefarious reasons. Welcome to Michael's World, mind the fairies.

The world according to Druncker!


--
"If you dont read the news paper, you are un-informed. If you read the
news paper, you are mis-informed."

Mark Twain