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Re: [ARSCLIST] MX5050 speed change



At 01:22 PM 6/21/2006, John Loy wrote:
We tried extensivly to do that change but were told it is time consumeming and counter productive to do then have to change back and forth all the time. If it is something permanent or you have a whole
lot of tapes to do I would suggest it. The manual should give you step by step instructions. Of course re-alignment etc will be in order. What we have done to keep workflow going is just to record into our DAW at 3 3/4 speed on 88.2 sampling rate . Then manually change the sample rate to 44.1 and there you have it.
John Loy

Hello, John,


It is a little more complex than that as there needs to be re-equalization.

You can either get a 1.88 in/s test tape and align the machine playing it at 3.75 for flat response OR you can record the tape on your DAW and flatten the response in the DAW.

Doing the latter means you don't have to adjust the tape machine's EQ at 3.75.

I hope to publish a table of cross equalizations. Jay McKnight has some in his Choosing and Using document at www.flash.net/~mrltapes/

But his are what you set the test tape to in order to use the test tape to calibrate the machine at another speed. To play the test tape flat, you need the inverse of his numbers.

I've been struggling with Excel and testing a variety of test tapes and EQs to confirm my spreadsheet is working properly. Jay did this long ago and while he was quite genial, he had other projects on his mind at the moment, so I'm on my own with this one. Please be patient.

I THOUGHT at least some versions of the Otari MX5050 had a hysteresis-synchronous capstan motor which would mean changing pulleys if it is belt drive or the capstan diameter (which would affect the whole tape path) if it were direct drive. The MTR-10/12 are servo'd capstan motors.

The other issue is the head gap length. Typical repro head gap lengths are in the neighbourhood of 2-2.5-3 µm (~80-100-120 µin) while the Studer loggers have head gap lengths of 1.4 µm (~55 µin) which places the gap loss first null at a higher wavelength/frequency.

The gap loss calculations are on the MRL Web site as well--as well as a program somewhere to calculate it.

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.



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