[Scott Dorsey]

John Williamson wrote:
On 05/04/2017 03:06, Scott Dorsey wrote:

How easy is it to set azimuth? If you have to ride it, can you? That is
really the key to getting acceptable cassette transcriptions.

On the unit I have, drill a small hole and use a jeweller's screwdriver
to twiddle the adjustment screw.

That's probably enough. A lot of cheaper cassette decks have screws that are
not designed for constant adjustment and wear out pretty quickly with that
kind of use, but considering what they cost, that's fine.

Reading the original post, it's not likely that the user will want to
bother riding azimuth, and to do it automatically is likely to cost a
lot more than she is willing to spend. The reason I suggest them is
because they are a single unit with one lead to connect and so are very
easy to use once plugged into a computer.

At least getting the azimuth set once for the tape is critical, because the
azimuth is so far off and the top end suffers badly. And once the frequency
response changes, the dolby tracking does wrong.

While the gold standard is a Nakamichi Dragon plugged into a 24 bit
converter, and a computer running Capstan to get rid of the wow and
flutter, it is a lot of hard work and expense to set up to save a few
home recordings which will likely only ever be listened to a couple of
times each.

Actually, Capstan often does more harm than good on old cassettes. The
flutter problems, for the most part, just have to be lived with. A lot of
the issue here is knowing what to try and correct and what to leave alone.

I hear too many old recordings that have been NoNoised to death to the point
where the noise reduction artifacts are far more annoying than the noise
would have been. Some of the flutter reduction stuff today is like that too.

Apart from the issues with the mechanics of the transport, the sound
quality will be as good as the original ever sounded on a portable deck
when recorded using Audacity and a track splitter. After that, the sky
is the limit on cost and inconvenience. This isn't a job recreating the
best possible sound to commercially release the result, it's just a way
of keeping a reasonable quality copy for listening to in future, once
the tape deck or the cassette wears out.

The issues with the mechanics of the transport are 90% of the problem (and
the cassette shell is part of the transport). Everything else is gravy.

Of course, if these are commercial recordings, there is a very good
chance there is already a decent copy available online or on CD, which
saves all the faff.

Indeed.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."