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Re: [ARSCLIST] Can 78s sound better than LPs?
It's amazing cassettes got as hifi as they did. I don't think your client is missing anything except
hiss on a cassette above 16K. Leave it to Nak to have a good, solid mechanism. The big problem I run
into with cassettes are wow and flutter -- and of course Dolby incompatibility between machines. I
get cassettes in from time to time and the client listens and makes a face. Why can't that piano
sound better? Because it wasn't recorded better! I show them that my Nak holds speed like it should,
that it's their original recording deck. Same story with old belt-drive reel decks. And of course
wire recorders. Just not designed for wow and flutter specs like digital-era ears want to hear. Wow
and flutter have been gone in the home listening environment for so long that people now notice it.
Not so in the age of off-center LPs and cassette decks playing back mass-market pre-recorded tapes.
As far as I know, the only way to fix a wow and flutter plagued recording is pay the folks at
Plagent Process a good hunk of change to grab and regulate the bias frequency (if it's present) and
this regulate the pitch.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lou Judson" <loujudson@xxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2006 11:29 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Can 78s sound better than LPs?
Thanks Tom. My studio partner had one of those three-mic-input Naks,
and I loved using it as long as I didn't have to lug it around! Heavy
as a Nagra... and more quirky, as you say.
As for the junky part, it is interesting to watch SpectraFoo as I
transfer - slightly rising hiss to 16k and then a sharp cutoff, nothing
above. He is wisely choosing no noise reduction or processing at all,
and I am (equally wisely) capturing them in 24 bit... By the way, Foo
shows no azimuth problem I can see, the mono tapes among them are a
straight line...
Interestingly, the Dolby seems to track perfectly. MOST cassettes I get
in sound better with Dolby off and a bit of NR os one flavor or
another...
<L>
Lou Judson • Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689
On Aug 26, 2006, at 4:45 AM, Tom Fine wrote:
Hi Lou:
This has been discussed, I think on this list, but it was a while back. You are a good
businessman! It is VERY smart to have a client bring in his deck if it's a Nak. Nak has some
non-standard things with Dolby (non-standard = not compatible with other manufacturers). If you
have, say, a Nak Dragon, you should be able to reproduce his tapes perfectly (and then some since
the Dragon's transport is more stable), but if his portable got dropped a few times, it might have
unique azimuth and speed issues all its own. I forgot the particulars, but I think some argue that
Nak is the only one who followed the Dolby B standard to the letter while everyone else didn't,
but whatever the reason, Dolby B tapes made on another deck can sound wrong played back on a Nak
and vice-versa. Not all the time, but sometimes. I'm hoping Richard Hess pipes up with the
technical particulars on this.
-- Tom Fine
PS -- Your client is not so crazy about using the original deck. The tapes I made on my late Teac
deck, which made it through high school, college and beyond and probably played 2500+ 45-minute
cycles, never sound as good on other decks, including the Naks in the studio. That Teac deck was
definitely in standard azimuth per a STL cassette, as are the decks in the studio. It just sounded
brighter and more alive with tapes it made.
PPS -- Given the advantage of age and the advances of science/technology, I'd classify cassettes
as a junk medium. But, less junky than Minidisc to my ears. At least cassettes tried to capture
the full audio spectrum instead of come up with some robo-"perceptual encoding" scheme to avoid
it!