This is Greg Williams. He is the director of Dex Audio, Australia's only tape duplication plant. Which basically makes him the Godfather of cassette manufacturing in Australia. Here's an exclusive look at how a cassette is made.
Hey, I'm restoring some tapes currently from a family friend's albums who passed. Some of them have like a test tone stepping through 400Hz 1K 2K 4K or something like that, others have an almost inaudible very low frequency rumble at the end of side b for about 5 seconds. You reckon that's what those tones are about?
@@darrengeorge9965 The rumble sound is the tone used to make the cassette loader cut the tape at the album boundaries, while the rising tone is called an XDR tone, which was used to optimize the sound quality for the type of tape that they were using.
@@brentfisher902 right, thanks for explaining that, thought it must have been a test tone as it didn't sound like part of the artistic work. And the rumble shows up very obvious and loud on the waveform and it looked deliberate to me but I can't hear it. Now I know what it is. I noticed it's only on the studio recorded ones not the domestic recorded ones. One album I have 3 official copies of it but they all sound different to each other and all very dull. But even when I was I kid hearing it for the first time all 3 sounded very bad even back then.
hi the first lot of tape decks are otari DP units i got i got a DP 2700 myself came in to some that needed a lot of work on them i can tell you are are great to unit you got to be carefull when getting the pancake out
32x recording? It means that the bandwidth the audio head has to go thru is about 32 times higher in pitch than the higher frequency being recorded on tape. Let's assume 12khz, it means that the electronics has to be able to handle 640hz up 385khz bandwidth while recording to replicate the 20-12000hz bandwidth. I would really doubt that such a technique can produce a really high fidelity recording. What about the wow and flutter at those speeds? Everything has to be spot on!
I assume you remember the double cassette deck. Some have a double speed of copying. The copy quality was much worse than when copying at normal speed despite the fact that at 2x speed you changed the correction in the head circumference (automatically).. In the case of 32x speed machines, you have a different correction of signal amplitude as a function of frequency for the head, a different head design than in the home deck. Look, DAT records higher frequencies on the tape than CC. DAT saves information 0 and 1 on tape with a recording density of 1000-2000 bit / mm or more densely. So technology is not a big challenge. But I admit, the quality of such prerecord tape is worse than you would record on your tape recorder straight from a CD at normal speed. By the way, in VHS system analogue signal is write by head on tape and contain chrominance and luminance signal up to 5MHz.
Especially for you, I searched for information about the frequency response at copying speed 32 times. At 32 times faster, the bandwidth is 480kHz, while at 64 times faster, 960kHz. The heads in the dubbing cassette players are made of monocrystalline ferrite, alsifer alloy (sendust-SA). These are amorphous materials.
32x isn’t even that fast. Digital bin machines are capable of up to 256:1 speeds. Every major cassette release has used this technology since the ‘90s. When you’re making millions of cassettes, real-time duplication would be impossible. In 1990 there were 440M+ cassettes sold, which would have taken tens of thousands of these machines running 24/7 year-round to produce.
@@godofspacetime333 I wouldn't say impossible. For years no company could come up with a reliable way of making pre-recorded video tapes except in real time, and those are often a couple of hours long, and in the case of a popular film would have sold by the million. I guess they just ran the duplicating machines 24-7.
@@MrDuncl And if you try to split a yellow RCA jack video signal so you can record on 2 VCRs the obvious way it will not work as connecting the second VCR will 'load' the circuit and the picture will darken...you need to make what is referred to as a 'buffer amplifier' which allows for the RCA jack to keep a same picture brightness whether or not 1 or more than one output is connected. The 2N2222 transistor will work for this...
Your claim of 'Australia's only tape duplication plant' needs to be qualified by the word 'audio', as AAV Australia had a number of far larger video duplication plants.
Cassettes are completely fucked they're bullshit after playing a pre-recorded tape in excess over 200x (a rough estimate) over serveral years the tape winds onto the hubs unevenly & jams up tight although ive still got a large pre-recorded cassette tape collection they sit in the closet fully spooled never played again In May 1994 we switched 2 the cd & have never looked back on cassette tapes again, i use 2 have heaps of TDK (D,AD,SA,SAX), BASF (Chrome Ferro Type 1 & 2) various Maxwell & Sony tapes they all went bye bye years ago i found no use in them shits. I hope they'll never bring the cassettes here in Australia who really gives a shit about old fashioned analogue antique bullshit anyway 😤😤😤😤😤
Wow , your comment is your opinion and I respect your opinion.I myself live in the USA 🇺🇸 and I never had any major problems , like you did with cassettes.Maybe you hate cassettes now but people here in the USA still love ❤ cassettes. INCLUDING myself.
