Tape Decks, Dolby NR and re-recording the analog way

[Compyfox]

Thanks very much for the information.

So just running it through the deck and only having it in "record" mode, but not doing anything else so that I have the input "gain" slider for setting the volume and only record the output directly doesn't affect a thing. Hm... Okay, if I go over 0dB in the digital way, it's clipping, if I do that with analog equipment, I get soft clipping thanks to the analog headroom. But this way I could also abuse a normal mixer, or create an own circruit with transistors. Interesting to think about the concept though.


Anyway... I found an old tape machine in the basement just a minute ago. Unfortunately it's a 1 head system, a Loewe Opta with like 1/4" magnet bands. Unfortunately this thing suffered over the years and the moist down there. It rusted on the metal parts (backside) and the dust crawled into the electric. It's a nice thing anyway, so I'll try to maybe breathe some live into it again, but I don't think it's that suitable for studio usage - and may it even be for experimenting. My grandfather however has a old Grundig Device, but I also think that this one has a single head only, so nothing really useful for on-the-fly recording - and due to nostalgic reasons, he won't give it away (understandable).


Well... so I'm basically stuck again with what I have, which is cool. I think the major problem with such a device is anyway to get the tapes and spare reels. Also I think it's hard to get a multi-head system nowadays, unless you're really lucky, find it at a pawn shop, flea market or even eBay - but most stuff I found there so far were barely documented.

Guess it's going back to schematic circuit diagram for me again, or just pure theory - at least for the time being. And... unless somebody else has some other interesting idea of course.

[kenn]

Thanks very much for the information.

So just running it through the deck and only having it in "record" mode, but not doing anything else so that I have the input "gain" slider for setting the volume and only record the output directly doesn't affect a thing. Hm... Okay, if I go over 0dB in the digital way, it's clipping, if I do that with analog equipment, I get soft clipping thanks to the analog headroom. But this way I could also abuse a normal mixer, or create an own circruit with transistors. Interesting to think about the concept though.

Just about all analog audio circuits clip hard, too. It may not be as "crispy" as digital clipping, but it's not the soft saturation you'd get through tape.

But don't give up. Pump a signal through the cassette deck or whatever you've got lying around; you may discover something interesting. Also, if the older recorders you mentioned are from the 60s or 50s, they may have germanium or tube circuitry, they may well add something interesting to the signal.

About the wierdest thing I've tried is to feed a line-level signal into the volume-control of a small Sony table-radio, which has germanium transistors and a few transformers. It made a really grungy distortion. I just mic'ed it's 4" speaker. You can also try this with any older amp or radio, especially if it has tubes. Please be careful if you do this; some tube radios are directly connected to the AC cord, which makes them dangerous to work on.

[Hink]

I guess only a Guru like Kingston can help out here. Maybe if we scream loud enough, he'll notice us? Heh.

hmmm...why don't you try my advice first...I know more than one "guru" who back in the day discovered the benefits of a vcr for a mastering deck

[Compyfox]

Hm... old radios... haha, that surely reminds me of the abuse that Audioease did with their new Speakerphone plugin. Definitely worth a try if I have old amps and stuff like that lying around.

Regarding the clipping again. Okay, clipping is some sort of distortion alright. but the analog clipping is a slow grwing line, while digital it's squarewave to no end. The upper limits of the circut can be overused of (old) analog hardware, thanks to it's physics. But you're right, it's not saturation, it's clipping - soft clipping however. Unless I totally misunderstood that in school.


I really, really gotta try that out. Should have kept that old tapedeck which was broken in terms of the deck, the volume sliders, the VU meters, but everything else was fine. And it had 1,4" connectors.


I'm kinda envied that you got the OTARI or 225USD, kenn. If I look in eBay now , somebody sells it as B II model for 600Euro, plus 15bucks shipping. But it's looking so brand new, and it has XLR(!!!) connectors.

Since I asked my mother about this old tapemachine of hers, my whole family went haywire and ask all of their friends if they still have a device lying around. Sometimes I really wish I'm like 10 years longer in the business or knew the stuff I know now back in 1995. *heh*

hmmm...why don't you try my advice first...I know more than one "guru" who back in the day discovered the benefits of a vcr for a mastering deck

Haha, definitely no offense. I just know that Kingston went apesh*t everytime somebody wentioned tape saturation plugins. I'd love to do that, but I guess usual consumer VCR devices don't do that on the fly either. So I need to record first, then play back.

Not to mention that we all in our family ditched VCRs almost completely. We have one Stereo Device (else mono over and over), but it has no special connectors like RCA - it's a 6 head HiFi Stereo system. It's the one from my brother however, and he sure as hell won't give it out since it's also a DVD player combi unit. I do have an NTSC 3 head VCR, but this one's only Mono - a Panasonic NV SD40.

It's an interesting concept though... leaving the video track "black" and only use it for audio recordings. But does that really work on the fly without modifications?

[Hink]

the only thing really lacking is input level monitoring, but you have that taken care of by watching your output levels. When all I had was a 4-track cassette instead of bouncing tracks I first used a cassette deck. Instead of bouncing tracks 1,2, and 3 to track 4 I would fill all four tracks and record them to a two track. Then I would rerecord that to two tracks on the 4-track on another tape or further up the tape. (kept things in stereo) This worked awesome, then oneday a friend told me about using a vcr...then it worked even better. No mods needed

[Compyfox]

So... you're basically only using that 2cm magnet band from a VCR as 2 track now? But that means you have to record it to tape first, then rewind, play back and record it back to PC in the progress. Or can you really do realtine saturation with this?

Sorry, but this is confusing me a bit.

[Hink]

I don't do it now, I was talking when I had a 4-track...but yeah that's basically it. The only time I ever used a deck in realtime for saturation (or as we called it then "The Jimi Hendrix sound") was when Nixon was still in office. That's actually how I discovered distortion as a kid, with a Realistic 8-track recorder (cartridge) pegging the vu meters.

[bluelife]

Another 2 ideas to try for retro sounds.

1. buy two old valve radios and send a channel to each and re-record them with mics over the speakers

2. re-sample the whole song using an old sampler (I bought an EPS M 13 Bit sampler a while back, but the memory isn't sufficient of course and it would be a problem with most samplers I guess)

Also, try using recording it in Dublin

blue

[Compyfox]

*stares at his ADS 16bit hardware sampler*
22s in full stereo, 44kHz - 2MB internal RAM, no upgrades available anymore. Now this is what I call HARDCORE NOSTALGIC. *cough*

Nah seriously... for all that "record through other speakers" thing, there's Speakerphone - very handy indeed. I don't want to go too crazy here. That tape saturation thing was the best thing that I could go for at the moment, but it's not that easy to pull off after all. I guess I'll have contact with a bandmachine in school this semester, but I won't bid anything on it. I guess the only way we have access to it, is by "touching" it, but not acutal "using".


Regarding the VCR thing again, Hink.
If you don't record video, you basically have noise on the tape. Or did you plug a "black" channel into it to make more room for the audio material? And... wouldn't be the sound all bassy and no highend at all? I thought thanks to the hysteresis, you get a special form of highend that way. And Nixon? Wasn't that way before 3+ head systems were even used? Not to mention still Mono?

[Hink]

*stares at his ADS 16bit hardware sampler*
22s in full stereo, 44kHz - 2MB internal RAM, no upgrades available anymore. Now this is what I call HARDCORE NOSTALGIC. *cough*

Nah seriously... for all that "record through other speakers" thing, there's Speakerphone - very handy indeed. I don't want to go too crazy here. That tape saturation thing was the best thing that I could go for at the moment, but it's not that easy to pull off after all. I guess I'll have contact with a bandmachine in school this semester, but I won't bid anything on it. I guess the only way we have access to it, is by "touching" it, but not acutal "using".


Regarding the VCR thing again, Hink.
If you don't record video, you basically have noise on the tape. Or did you plug a "black" channel into it to make more room for the audio material? And... wouldn't be the sound all bassy and no highend at all? I thought thanks to the hysteresis, you get a special form of highend that way. And Nixon? Wasn't that way before 3+ head systems were even used? Not to mention still Mono?

I didn't have anymore noise than from my casstte deck (albeit a cheapy)...the nixon reference about using my old 8-track for distortion...I didn't record it (I was like 12), I hadn't yet learned what distortion was. It was just by accident I plugged my guitar (an Alamo El Dorado) into my 8-track recorder and ran it too hot that I learned how to get a fuzzy tone. My father helped me build my first guitar amp from a ham radio amp.

I was never lucky to have the right tools until later in life. Do you have any idea how hard it was to learn songs from 8-track tapes in the 70s? (remember they had no rewind) While my friends had all the cool boxes I had none, "make-shift" was my middle name. I had a kid before I got my first wah-wah pedal (and I was 22 when my son was born)

My first lesson of overdrive being better than fuzz came about then too. I had a Polytone amp which had built in fuzz for a couple years, I sold my plow to buy an old Plexi head. At the time (82 or 83) the first Boss Heavy Metal pedal came out, I got that too. In the early 80's there was a new amp company that came out called Tusc, I thought they were the best. Well that is until my best friend bought one, but I did get a Tusc 2x12 and the plexi was on that. I plugged the Boss pedal in and it sucked, I finally had a Marshall, but it wasn't doing it for me. My friend had an MXR eq pedal, I plugged that in instead of the Boss and it was like the heavens opened up...the golden tone, but you wanna talk about noise?

So keep that in mind, sometimes you discover things by accident (which was mentioned in this thread by someone else). My theory has always been "any port in astorm"...

[kenn]

I'm kinda envied that you got the OTARI or 225USD, kenn. If I look in eBay now , somebody sells it as B II model for 600Euro, plus 15bucks shipping. But it's looking so brand new, and it has XLR(!!!) connectors.

Since I asked my mother about this old tapemachine of hers, my whole family went haywire and ask all of their friends if they still have a device lying around. Sometimes I really wish I'm like 10 years longer in the business or knew the stuff I know now back in 1995. *heh*

Hi,

The market for stuff like old tape decks is cyclic. Right now, yes, there seems to be no great deals on OTARI's, but if you're serious about getting an open reel deck, be patient and check ebay every week or so. I usually search ebay for "reel recorder", which brings up almost everything pro and consumer. Old decks also turn up in the strangest places, like friend's basements, pawn shops or yard sales.

Before I decided to buy, I had seen one go for as little as $60, so when I saw another in Canada starting at $100, I followed the auction and won it. It was a safe risk for me because I knew that I could fix it or be able to re-sell if there was a problem. My luck was good: the deck is in decent shape with lots of life yet, and the seller packed it extremely well. Even so, I've had to re-oil everything, and I still need to clean and adjust the brakes.

Anyways, if I were in your shoes, I would ask to borrow the family deck for a week and try some experiments. If you're successful, they may be agreeable to lending it whenever you need it. Also, have you tried using tape saturation VST plugin's? This KVR thread lists some, including good free ones. A saturation plugin plus a tiny bit of phasing or chorus can be pretty close, and interesting in their own right.

[Compyfox]

Actually, I seem to be lucky. Very lucky if I may add. My aunt has a Grundig Device, my Granddad has one (though I don't know the numbers of both, but they're TS - unforfunately the bandmachinemuseum is down, so I can't do research), and then the Loewe Opta from my Mom, which is unfortunately in very bad shape - rust, dust mites, etc. It was just standing for way too long in the basement. But if I'm patient, I have my "own" device by end of January, if my aunt finds her old tapemachine again and wants to give it away that is.


Speaking of which... Where do I still get tapes for that thing? There do I get spareparts? I know that there's still a market for it as Reel2Reel systems are still being developed. If one of that units is really a 4-track system (which'd be the TS1000 at least), then I need 1/2" tapes, else I need 1/4" ones if I'm not mistaken. But the tapeheads sure will be old indeed (which might have it's own positive effect, but just to be on the save side)


I actually know the thread, kenn. I used Ferox and Samplitude am|track so far, but nothing really convinced me yet. It's still digital after all and I'd really love to experiment with the real thing. Not that these are bad plugins, they're good for something indeed. But I guess nothing can beat the real tape after all for these tasks.

Still, I'd love to see that "Ampex" rebuilt finally be released. It looked interesting, at least in terms of the specs and screenshot.

[Compyfox]

Let's bump this one if somebody maybe knows, where to get spareparts and spare tapes.