12
« on: February 09, 2009, 03:49:35 PM »
I have old family reels, recorded on the first Soviet consumer high-quality machine, Astra-2. (The qualifiers are from its manual.) It's a half-track mono machine, two tracks, you turn the reel over to listen to the other side, as usual. Being a quadrophonic fan, I got an Akai GX630D-SS, and discovered that listening to my family tapes is a stochastic experience. The quadro mode helps very much to get all contents, but not very reliably. Usually, I get the original forward side from quadro track 2, or backward from track 3. In both cases I feed the RCA outputs to Edirol UA-1EX and record on a Mac with Audacity at 96 KHz, and the backward one can be time-reversed and listened to with the same quality.
What I notice is, I pick up different amount of cross talk each time I play the tape -- as if the quarter-track heads wobble between and around the half-track recording's actual tracks. The original voice recordings had many usual real-life pauses and shifts in the recording level, so I'm not sure whether the gaps and sudden level drops are original or caused by the 2/4 tracks mismatch.
In any case, when researching the issue, and googling for something like "reading mono tapes on a stereo reel to reel tape machine," I've stumbled upon this amazing project. Kudos to all! If I get a Technics 1500, will it read properly the mono tracks I have? Remember I get the signal from track 2, so apparently it's the upper half of the tape being the forward side -- does it match the Technics layout?
Also, with all due respect, quadrophonic surround beats any type of stereo quality; being a long-term SACD fan, I can hardly imagine a stereo tape beating the immersive experience. I noticed the nuance such as the sound of fingers plucking strings first thing listening to jazz. In order to achieve a true quality comparison, I suggest the guys in charge issue SACDs accompanying the tapes, so that we can really compare sound, not nostalgic biases/hindsighted justifications of expense. SACDs are not copyable still, so adding them to a license wouldn't be too hard, IMHO. Why not produce the original masters in multitrack on quadrophonic tape? I'd be really curious to compare the quality obtainable from a Technics to that of a quadrophonic Akai.
Cheers,
Alexy