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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!harvard!talcott!panda!teddy!rdp
From: rdp@teddy.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.audio
Subject: Re: Re: Tighter bass and edgeless piano
Message-ID: <1401@teddy.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 8-Oct-85 16:23:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: teddy.1401
Posted: Tue Oct  8 16:23:12 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Oct-85 08:11:54 EDT
References: <597@tellab1.UUCP> <4361@alice.UUCP> <613@tellab1.UUCP>
Reply-To: rdp@teddy.UUCP (Richard D. Pierce)
Organization: GenRad, Inc., Concord, Mass.
Lines: 37

In article <613@tellab1.UUCP> etan@tellab1.UUCP (Nate Stelton) writes:
>In article <4361@alice.UUCP> ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) writes:
>>> Here's a different one for you:  Can you hear the stick hit the cymbal?
>>> This is not always answered the same for every 20-20k system.  I have 2
>>> cassette decks that have the same freq ranges, but a cymbal hit by a stick
>>> sounds like a "tick" as recorded by one and "sshh" by the other.  This is
>>
>>Nah, it's probably that your two decks differ in azimuth setting.
>
>Theoretically, I guess no two decks will have *exactly* the same azimuth
>adjustment.  The interesting thing in my 2-deck experiment was that a
>recording on deck #1 sounded better being played back on deck #2 than the
>recording from deck #2.  Deck #1 is a Teac A-105 from 1979, and #2 is a newer
>Akai CF-14 (I think that's the right number).  I have found that the old Teac
>at $130 records better than other, more recent machines in this price range.
>

In my travels, one of the things I discovered is that most cassette decks
are so dismally set up as to be laughable. The two brands mentioned above
I found to be amongst the biggest offenders. I recall that somewhere in the
neighborhood of 90% of the machines failed, by a wide margin, to meet
manufacturers specifications out of the box, when used with the manufacturer-
recommended tape. Certainly I have found Akai to be among the worst in this
respect. The deck may or may not be well designed, etc., but whatever its
inherent advantages are, they are lost by this sort of slipshod set-up.

Setting up a cassette deck properly (most especially two-head varieties) is
a pain, and takes someone resonably competent on the order of 20 minutes.
Consider that someone a manufacturer might make 100,000 such units, and that
there are only some 25,000 or so 20 minute periods in a year, it is not
surprising that they aren't set up right at the factory.

The result is that a cassette deck that claims to be able to do 20-20,000Hz
at -20VU might actually be doing 20-8,000 Hz! (this is no exaggeration, but
rather typical!)

Dick Pierce