Topic: Analog Reconsidered

[jethro bo deen]

It is almost impossible to source Quality NEW Cassette tape these days.
NAC (national audio company) in Missouri USA is the only place that I'm aware of
that is still assembling quality Type II (high bias) tapes that are outstanding.
The 747 Cobalt  and The 751 Chrome are  on par with old Sony/Maxell/TDK high bias.
Maybe not as good as the best of those from the eighties, but certainly close. 
The  Maxell XLII & TDK SA of the past decade or twelve years or so were junk in
comparison to  eighties & early nineties TDK & MAXELL.      Sony still had quality
tape products.    Now in 2012,  NOBODY IS PRODUCING TYPE II tape, outside of NAC
which probably has  a huge amount of tape product on hand to load into shells which
was still produced when Tape factories were producing Type II stock.

I suggest that those interested in old school TAPE,  r2r , Cassette that they may
want to visit http://www.tapeheads.net/forums.php
There are a huge number of ANALOG fans there.    Some of those there are
retired engineers who once worked for the large firms building/designing Tapes & Decks.
There are others who  are  experts at  rebuilding and recalibrating and re-belting old tape
decks so that they operate as they should.
Old equipment that is  off its game, will never perform = to what it would have in the eighties/seventies
when it was functioning properly.
My suggestion is if you have a functioning deck is that you should seek all of the USED quality TDK, SONY, MAXELL
type II tapes produced when the quality was superb.       Ditto for Maxell r2r tapes circa  1978-1984.
Those machines aren't any good if you don't have decent tape to play around with.
NOS  tapes can get Pricey$!
There are plenty of them out there still.
Tape decks can make wonderful recordings if you know what you are doing  and the deck functions properly.
I had an Akai  X-200D  purchased in '71  that was a basic r2r  that made good tapes for the twenty-five years
that I used it.    Many of the later day r2r decks were far superior, but that Akai was still a good performer.
Cassette decks of the eighties,  especially the TECHNICS dbx and YAMAHA dbx  noise reduction decks were
the best ones ever produced.    dbx was never popular because it never appeared in car stereos/boomboxes but
it gave  S/N ratio unequalled by any other analog tape.    s/n range of 92 to 95 ,  very close to modern digital stuff.
Dolby S,  Dolby C, and Dolby B  never came close.
The  dbx noise reduction used on latter day high end r2r machines  was different than the cassette version but it
made those early eighties R2R machines so equipped  the most sought after,  to this day.    Huge improvement in
s/n ratio which on most old r2r decks was not that good  approx 65 for most without noise reduction,  though they
have wide frequency ranges to 25k,   hiss is still a factor when rec levels drop.

[bryonsos]

Cassette decks of the eighties,  especially the TECHNICS dbx and YAMAHA dbx  noise reduction decks were
the best ones ever produced.    dbx was never popular because it never appeared in car stereos/boomboxes but
it gave  S/N ratio unequalled by any other analog tape.    s/n range of 92 to 95 ,  very close to modern digital stuff.
Dolby S,  Dolby C, and Dolby B  never came close.
The  dbx noise reduction used on latter day high end r2r machines  was different than the cassette version but it
made those early eighties R2R machines so equipped  the most sought after,  to this day.    Huge improvement in
s/n ratio which on most old r2r decks was not that good  approx 65 for most without noise reduction,  though they
have wide frequency ranges to 25k,   hiss is still a factor when rec levels drop.

The first tape I made with my PMD430, I did the first set with Dolby B and the second set with dbx. I used dbx only from that point forward. I'll see if I can dig that one up...

[darby]

both sources were recorded with AKG 451/ck1s... same stand and configuration
one into Whirlwind 18V phantoms > Teac DA-P20 (DAT @16/48)
the other into AKG 18V phantoms > Sony TC-D5M (metal cassette no Dolby transferred @ 24/48)

http://archive.org/details/gd1994-07-26.AKG451.Darby.119445.Flac1648

http://archive.org/details/gd1994-07-26.AKG451.Darbys2nd.120292.Flac2448

http://archive.org/details/gd1994-07-27.AKG451.Darby.119473.Flac1648

http://archive.org/details/gd1994-07-27.AKG451.Darbys2nd.120300.Flac2448

I prefer the cassette masters transferred @ 24/48 

Thanks Darby - Dl'ing a few comp tracks...

And thanks for all the etree seeds - you seem to have recorded a lot during the crossover from analog > digital.

not necessarily the best comparison, as the DAT's recorded on the Teac DA-P20 were recorded with pre-emphasis, and it looks like it was never removed.  Run the DA-P20 tapes through a de-emphasis EQ and then compare to the analog tape recordings, and you'll have a better comp.

thanks  Jason, for your work on my phish shows   

what I noticed most on my cassette masters was a sense of space, not just music

[DSatz]

Please don't idealize dbx noise reduction. It depends on a very well-set-up, well-maintained tape deck, first-quality tape of the exact kind that the deck was set up for, and levels that have been set in the optimal zone for the tape, the deck and the given program material. Otherwise the noise reduction system will tend to exaggerate any unevenness in frequency response in the deck (including lost highs after the tapes have been in storage for a while, or saturation from overload at high frequencies--which was especially a problem with cassettes and even more so when people tried to use "analog tape squash" as an effect ...).

With dbx you can hear (or at least, many people including myself can hear, and I find it almost incredible when others said they couldn't hear it) noise that varies in level along with the program material--which for anyone who is at all aware of it, is audibly MUCH more distracting than a low level of steady hiss.

I tried to use the professional dbx system (retrospectively called "dbx I") with my Nagra tape recorder in the 1970s and while it was amazing when it worked well, it also produced some tapes that were unusable due to the above problems. I remember recording a wonderful Dutch recorder player named Marion Verbruggen--due to modulation noise in playback, the tape sounded as if firecrackers were going off whenever she hit a high note. I wish I still had that tape; I'd post some samples here as a cautionary tale of woe.

Multi-band systems with a less severe (i.e. less than 2:1) compression ratio, such as Telefunken's "c4" system or anything from Dolby Labs, were safer, much more real-world-practical designs. dbx was designed on the assumption of having an ideal tape recorder and ideal tape between the encoder and the decoder. The only place where it really worked well was when they came out with an alternative digital recording system (one whose results, unfortunately, could not be edited--they simply didn't deal with that necessity when they designed the system ... ).

--best regards

[bryonsos]

Believe me, I wasn't idealizing dbx, merely sharing my experience with it. It was actually a PITA since it never sounded right unless you did playback on the same deck it was recorded on. I used Dolby or nothing for 1st gens, and then moth balled the masters. You can hear an example of how clear and hissless dbx can be on the 1992-03-28 bonus disk Phish released with their Atlanta box set. This was Nakamichi CM300/CP1 (XY, FOB) > Marantz PMD430 (dbx on, Maxcell MX-S metal tape). When I talked to Kevin before they released it, he indicated that the remastering involved level adjustment and "mild" EQ, but didn't mention dehissing. He was working off of a 1st gen that may or may not have employed Dolby, I can't remember. Regardless, I pulled the tape out after I talked to him and even after 15+ years of storage, it sounded brand new. If DSatz is on the mark about levels, tape type etc., I got lucky with my choices 

[mfrench]

Skip the tape, and go right to vinyl. Old School

^^^
Build that into the bottom of your wheelchair!

thats a home unit.
This is portable:

[Gutbucket]

Nice.  Tweed too.  Wonder if it originally shipped with a white lab coat and bow tie.

Appears that while cutting the operator could monitor directly off disk with the playback arms, analogous to monitoring off the tape on a 3 head deck.

Despite similarity of layout that ain't no scratchin' DJ rig.

[mfrench]

That rig, a Presto Recording Corp. Model M Dual Turntable Recorder, sold in the later 40's for $599ºº
per this catalog image:
http://www.auctiva.com/hostedimages/showimage.aspx?gid=161841&ppid=1122&image=587249224&images=587248883,587249125,587249161,587249195,587249224,587249259,587249028&formats=0,0,0,0,0,0,0&format=0

catalog compiled here:
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v729/MokePics2/Presto%2015G2%201953%20Idler%20Turntable/Presto_Recording_Corp_1940s_Catalog/

[Gutbucket]

Wow, imagine what works out to in inflation adjusted dollars per channel/minute of recording time including media, compared to a what must be the current low cost dollar per channel/minute recording champ of today, the DR-680 with 8 channels for ~$700.  The Tascam doesn't come in tweed or include the labcoat though.  And probably won't be nearly as cool when it's 60 years old.

[DSatz]

Mr. Bucket, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $599 in the year 1948 was equvalent in purchasing power to $5,712 in 2012. I wonder how many of those turntable sets were ever sold at such a price. And thank you for raising this question, since the failure to take inflation into account is routine in discussions of the value of "vintage" sound equipment, distorting the outcome.

There used to be only a handful of professional audio manufacturers, dealers and distributors; it was a sellers' market. But now we live in an age of much steeper price competition. With inflation taken into account, new professional audio equipment generally costs distinctly less than comparable equipment from decades ago.

A corollary is that very few "vintage" items hold much of their original value. Exceptions to this are signficant but few in number--a handful of items that are quite scarce in unmodified, good working condition, such as the Neumann U 47 or the AKG C 12 or the "Telefunken" M 251 E--and notably, they all have major components for which no direct replacements are available any more. So for those models, it's once again a sellers' market.

--best regards

[Walstib62]

What about Dolby SR? Awesome system, but really only usable in studio or pro location setups.

[DSatz]

Dolby SR is/was a professional system. It is audibly transparent when set up correctly and used with professional-quality analog recorders. It's about twice as powerful as Dolby A. It gives somewhat less overall noise reduction effect than telcom c4 or dbx, but it can give a good 15 ips stereo 1/4" tape recorder a dynamic range in the area of 90 dB or even a touch more--quite similar to 16-bit linear PCM, which was the goal at the time.

"All other things being equal" (as they say) you really don't want a noise reduction system to be any more powerful than necessary, because to paraphrase a great philosopher, "with great power comes great" ... risk of audible side effects such as mistracking, frequency response errors and/or noise levels that ride up and down with the program material.

The consumer counterpart of Dolby SR was a system called Dolby S, which was never very widely used. That's partly because it was introduced so late in the game w/r/t when the whole audio world went digital. It was also for high-end decks only; Dolby licensed it for specific cassette decks that met their standards of performance, and that had the user-accessible adjustments necessary to calibrate the deck to the particular cassette being recorded.

By the way, the SR system works against "analog tape squash" in that (when recording) it reduces the highest frequencies at high signal levels and (in playback) restores them, so that saturation is less likely to occur. If you want to use analog tape as a sound processing device rather than as a transparent medium, don't use Dolby S or SR, either dbx system, telcom c4, or Telefunken's "Hi-Com" consumer system. Also avoid Dolby HX even though it's not a noise-reduction system as such. Either use systems such as Dolby B or C that don't offer any saturation protection, or don't use noise reduction at all.

[jethro bo deen]

Obviously,  I don't know one one millionth of what DSatz  knows on the specifics of the different noise reduction systems and their limitations,   but   I seem to recall that  Dolby requires one to get the levels more specifically calibrated for it to function best.
(Meaning that Dolby is much more level dependent )
I might be incorrect.
Perhaps  DSatz might care to explain the details.
Some have greater compatibility issues if played back on different machines as well.     Dolby B is said to be more compatible between differing Dolby B  decks,    and  Dolby C seems to have greater differences between decks.   
Dolby ( B, C, S)    on  cassette decks in particular  has no less limitations/issues  than for dbx noise reduction.   Decks have to function to specs.      One can argue that REC LEVELS with dbx  need not be as perfectly set(calibrated)  as if one was recording using Dolby .
No noise reduction system  is  entirely perfect and factors like the tape and its match for the deck set up and bias and where the recording levels go during the recording.
Noise reduction does improve things if things are close to how they ought to be.   The greater S/N ratio provided by dbx far exceeds anything Dolby B, C, or S  could do  in the cassette format.     A huge difference in Quality if things are working right and you are using good tape that is perfectly matched for the deck.
Cassette without  any noise reduction  is  not  the  greatest quality  as compared to r2r without noise reduction at 3 3/4.
Some prefer the noise of not using Noise reduction  on cassette versus the things that the various noise reduction schemes can bring in to the sound if things are not close to perfect.   

[runonce]

Obviously,  I don't know one one millionth of what DSatz  knows on the specifics of the different noise reduction systems and their limitations,   but   I seem to recall that  Dolby requires one to get the levels more specifically calibrated for it to function best.
(Meaning that Dolby is much more level dependent )
I might be incorrect.
Perhaps  DSatz might care to explain the details.
Some have greater compatibility issues if played back on different machines as well.     Dolby B is said to be more compatible between differing Dolby B  decks,    and  Dolby C seems to have greater differences between decks.   
Dolby ( B, C, S)    on  cassette decks in particular  has no less limitations/issues  than for dbx noise reduction.   Decks have to function to specs.      One can argue that REC LEVELS with dbx  need not be as perfectly set(calibrated)  as if one was recording using Dolby .
No noise reduction system  is  entirely perfect and factors like the tape and its match for the deck set up and bias and where the recording levels go during the recording.
Noise reduction does improve things if things are close to how they ought to be.   The greater S/N ratio provided by dbx far exceeds anything Dolby B, C, or S  could do  in the cassette format.     A huge difference in Quality if things are working right and you are using good tape that is perfectly matched for the deck.
Cassette without  any noise reduction  is  not  the  greatest quality  as compared to r2r without noise reduction at 3 3/4.
Some prefer the noise of not using Noise reduction  on cassette versus the things that the various noise reduction schemes can bring in to the sound if things are not close to perfect.   

The points about interoperability are probably true - but at this point in the game - Im looking at analog as a "master > remaster" medium - and not as an everyday playback media.
First pass, record - second pass playback/transfer to digital - done. Erase the tape and reuse it. No need to worry about tracking/alignment, or compatibility as you'll be using the same deck to master and playback.

For those who took the plunge - in both examples in the original post, the analog version is the second sample.

[andromedanwarmachine]

I've still got analog gear;

Two Sony Pro WM D6-C which both need repaired
A Fostex R8 which needs repaired

and my trusty Nakamichi DR3 which occupies music-system rack space in my house and still sees use- the only one that doesn't need repaired!!

I play quite alot of cassette stuff in the car actually- alot of my taste; 80s/90s electro sound much, much better off cassette. To me ears...

JimP