Reply-to: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx>
At 10:01 AM 2008-07-31, Trey Bunn wrote:
I've seen some USB cassette decks before, but I wondered about the
quality of them.
Hi, Trey,
I'm hoping for reports. So far, the only thing I've seen that looks
like a review is in Technologies for Worship Magazine (TWFM) and it's
for the UK-made high-speed USB unit. Let's start by saying this
digitizes at 22.05 ks/s so it's got half the bandwidth of a CD. As I
stated in my earlier post, it appears meant for spoken word and I
wouldn't even consider it for music.
At least in my mix of work, quality music cassettes amount to less
than 1% of what I do. It's almost all spoken word. If it is music,
it's poorly recorded family music. The saddest thing is when a
composer or his child comes to you with a cassette that's the only
known copy of the parent's work and then you find out it's got
distortion, etc.
When I speak to groups of archivists, I like to play an excerpt from
an organ recording I made of Jean Langlais at the Church of the
Heavenly Rest in NY City. I made it with a pair of AKG C-451 mics on
a Nakamichi 550 portable on Maxell tape. I transferred it about five
years ago on a Nakamichi Dragon. Sounds quite excellent.
So, while cassettes can sound surprisingly good when you use
expensive machines (my Sony TCD-5M just got the best transfer of an
endless loop cassette for a client because the Nakamichis wouldn't
play it and the cassette itself recommended that it be run flat),
most of the cassettes out there were recorded on bargain-basement recorders.
I think we need to define what the goals of the transfer are. I
suspect the Graff unit provides good intelligibility of the spoken
word which is very different than high fidelity music.
As far as the CONSUMER USB machines, if TracerTek is selling them,
they might be a small step above what you're thinking. TracerTek
tries to find good quality products for their clientele who they
think of as audiophiles (and address us thusly in their emails).
I don't know if the USB cassette machines are any worse than any
other cassette machine you can purchase new today. You know where
I've put my money and time...6.5 Dragons with one coming someday as
payment for a project I'm working on. The 0.5 is a brand-new (NOS)
mechanism to replace one that might fail in one of my machines.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.