Re: [ARSCLIST] 4-track tapes

["Steven C. Barr" <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Richter" <mrichter@xxxxxxx>

> At 01:27 PM 4/13/2004 -0400, Joel Bresler wrote:
> >A sound library I am collaborating with has a collection of what I
believe
> >to be home-recorded 4-track tapes. Played back on a conventional machine,
> >it sounds as if there are two different selections playing at once. These
> >tapes were made in California, and so I am wondering if they could be the
> >4-track system mentioned in the various articles below, one of which
> >mentions California as one of the few locales that used the system
broadly.
> Home recording was almost certainly open-reel. Muntz (I knew him well,
> though I never had one of his cars) promoted only cartridges.
If, in fact, this is true...and these are four-track reel-to-reel
tapes...they
are most likely to be "homebrew" four-track tapes made using a stereo
recorder.
I used to do this a lot when taping 78's...since the material was mono, I
only
needed one channel...and I could put twice as many 78's on a tape this way!

To play these back (or to dub them to CD-R) simply set the balance control
all
the way to one extreme (or set one channel's output to the desired level and
the other to zero). You'll then have the desired signal as one output, and
nothing as the other...you can Y-split the active channel and feed both for
dubbing purposes. You can also dub them as is, if you desire; however, you
need to play the resulting disc on a machine which allows you to select one
channel as the output.

To my knowledge, this stereo-splitting method was in common use among folks
who wanted to put the maximum amount of mono material on a stereo tape...
Steven C. Barr