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Re: [ARSCLIST] need audio cassette deck suggestions

For people who care about the quality of their family and institutional histories, good cassette playback is essential. It allows the engineer to reduce or eliminate some of the field-recording induced extra data that clouds so much of this material, or, at least, not make it worse.

In my studio they get copied to the hard drive and are cleaned up, not just dubbed to a CD. When people wish the latter, I suggest they look to a facility with a lower per-hour and a different attitude.

Many are made on battery operated machines of unreliable power. Audio cassettes hold strong personal memories for many folks. Their emotional ties to this material deserve the best we can do. Often I spend considerable time getting the playing speed right to "catch" the quality of a voice now gone.

Steve Smolian

----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Fine" <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2005 6:58 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] need audio cassette deck suggestions


Hi Richard:

Again, I do not argue with the merits of the famed Dragon for critical
content like music, but mono voice recordings (probably made on a portable
live in a rally room if they are political speeches or on a meeting room
table if they are meetings) are, um, not of great audio quality. So I see no
need to blow a big wad of cash on an elephant gun for that ant of a transfer
project. I figured a political-action group like the origin of the original
question would want to save budget for political action vs. setting up a
state-of-the-art transfer chain for mono spoken-word recordings.
Particularly if the project is a finite pile of stuff needing transfer. I
hate to sound like a certain tin-eared desert-rat member of another list we
both participate in but, as you said, different approaches ...

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard L. Hess" <ArcLists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 11:41 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] need audio cassette deck suggestions


I have to disagree with my good friend Tom. Actually, as I was
starting out in 2002 or so, it took Don Ososke a while to convince me
to get a Dragon - he was persuasive, but the price tag was high. My
only eBay negative was over a Dragon and I was the buyer.

Unless the tape is going to damage the Dragon, I am using Dragons
for >95% of my transfers. The clean highs and the low noise provide
an excellent platform for horrid tapes to attempt to clean them up.
I'm considering modding at least one Dragon to have manual azimuth
adjustment. It would just be a pot, I think.

Different approaches...

I have a Kenwood KX-W8030 which makes great tapes, but there is a
huge difference between its reproduction and a Dragon. I also have a
Nak MR-1 which is very good, but isn't the Dragon, and a Sony TC-D5M
which is OK or better (it's a portable) but it isn't quite as clean
as the Kenwood.

I haven't seen great cassette machines today, and the results from
the expensive-as-an-ePay-Dragon Tascam 122B have been
mixed--especially the demo where it was used at the ARSC conference
in Austin this year. I suspect that one was dirty or broken.

Cheers,

Richard

At 08:58 PM 11/8/2005, you wrote:
>Hi David:
>
> From what you're describing (mono WAV, etc), this is spoken-word
content? If
>so, I can't see the need for heaping hundreds of dollars on a vintage >Nak
>Dragon. Tascam still makes very good cassette decks, for a few hundred
>dollars at most. I believe Yamaha also makes cassette decks for the
consumer
>market, and perhaps others, which probably cost less. Any of these will
be
>just fine for spoken word transferred in mono. I'm guessing most of >these
>tapes were made with mono portable recorders anyway?
>
>If I were in your shoes -- assuming my guesses about the audio quality >of
>the content are correct -- I'd buy a moderately priced machine and keep
at 
>what you're doing and use the rest of your budget for the pizza and beer
>party you well deserve for taking on that most tedious task!
>
>If, on the other hand, you were transferring soundboard tapes from a
great
>jazz festival or nightclub, I'd say get a Dragon and shoot for the moon
with 
>quality. But I can't see it for mono spoken word tapes.
>
>-- Tom Fine

Richard L. Hess                              richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada             http://www.richardhess.com/
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm



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