Reply-to: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx>
At 01:27 AM 2008-11-22, Lou Judson wrote:
Stereo cassete heads have a wider path than mono ones, so the right
channel gets extra hiss from the guard band. And with wandering
azimuth on casettes I will use only th left for mono...
Hello, Lou,
I find that summing the two stereo tracks, even with the Dragons,
often doesn't work as well as taking one track.
I disagree that the stereo head is wider than the mono, and I offer
the following drawing from Tascam that shows many of the cassette standards: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/cass_trk_lrg.gif
In general, if all goes according to plan, I prefer the right channel
if it's there as it gets away from edge damage which is, alas, common
on C120s that some people used for oral histories.
But, I don't think there is a rule. I generally ingest a cassette in
stereo using the Dragons, and then look/listen to the waveform and
make my decision then. Often the two sides require different solutions.
I don't know of any good mono players that do better than the
Dragons, despite their stereo heads. The added noise from the
narrower head responds quite well to Algorighmix noise-free pro.
As to the original question, my limited attempts to do this on
problem tapes have gotten me nowhere nearer the goal than other techniques.
There is in one of the fancier filters DC6 the ability to take an
ambient track and a speech track and subtract the ambience, but this
requires a recording set up this way that might be done with a
surveillance "wire", but I haven't seen much gain from the technique
applied to normal tapes.
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.