Enzology cassette to digital question - Topic Powered by eve community

quote:
From Iarla, in another post:
A slightly nerdy technical meandering off topic question for Jaffa - What sort of a setup did you use to do the cassette to CD transfers of the Enz stuff - I presume you would have had access to really good broadcast quality cassette deck (Tascam 112 Mk3?). Did you go into a Computer Based setup, or a rackmount CD Burner like a HHB. Anything else in the chain? Seperate A/D Converter? NR Unit?

OK, time to get all techy and carried away with an absurdly long answer.

Most of the rare audio for the Enzology radio docos comes from cassette tapes belonging to the various members of the band, plus a few 1/4" open reels, DATs, CD-Rs, vinyl and VHS. There's been a variety of equipment and studios used since I began the project about seven years ago(!)

The rare vinyl was played on a Technics SP-15 turntable with a Shure cartridge, through a very nice Apogee A/D converter, and onto the SADiE digital editing system at 44.1khz 16 bit. Some vinyl recordings were then denoised and declicked with Cedar to remove surface noise and scratches. They were then archived to CD-R. (These days I'd probably do that sort of processing at 96khz, 24 bit, if I was being picky.)

The first batch of cassettes in 1999 were played on a Tascam 122 Mark II machine and plugged into the Apogee converter or straight into SADiE's own converters, depending on which studio I was in on the day. Unfortunately, at the time, I couldn't find a single cassette player that didn't have a fault of some sort. Very frustrating. A couple of years ago, RNZ replace those machines with new Tascam 122 Mark IIIs, which has made life much easier.

The angle of the cassette player's head had to be adjusted for each side of each cassette to ensure azimuth accuracy. The audio tracking must be replayed exactly as it was recorded. This so often gets forgotten when major albums get remastered and can lead to the complete loss of high frequencies, especially when played back in mono, due to the left channel being slightly out of sync with the right. (For a particularly appalling example, listen to [I}The Instrumental[/I] on "Other Enz". If you can, have a listen to it in mono as well.)

It was also very important do work out whether the recording was made with Dolby NR or not.

Often the speed of the tapes was incorrect. Sometimes I noticed this at the time and adjusted the speed with the pitch control. At other times I've realised when compiling the programmes on SADiE. This has meant either changing the pitch on the CD player and loading it into SADiE via the analogue converter, or loading it in digitally and changing the speed with SADiE's internal resampler.

Early on, I was denoising everything before archiving them onto CD-R. Soon, so many tapes were coming my way that I realised that it was too time consuming to do this. Plus, leaving the original sound with no processing meant more flexibilty later on. Today, I'm much less trigger-happy when it comes to denoising anyway. A bit of hiss never hurt anyone, really.

Most of the cassette tapes played back with no problems, but a number of them were stuck fast. Over time, the glue that holds the magnetic oxide to the tape comes apart, the tape sticks to itself and the heads and guide become so clogged up, nothing moves. The usual way to fix this with open reels is to literally bake them in the oven to remove the moisture. I'd never done this before and didn't fancy melting precious Split Enz recordings by accident, so I loosened things up with alcohol. The exact process is a trade secret

but I will tell you it was laborious.

Alastair Riddell recently lent me an open reel tape of Orb playing live at Founders Theatre in Hamilton in 1972, with (Tony) Eddie Rayner on keyboards and Paul Crowther on drums. I went to play it on our big Otari MTR-10 tape machine, thinking I probably wouldn't get very far with the tape and it would be all gummed up. Surprisingly, it had held together very well over the last 32 years. But it ran at 3/34 ips, half the speed of the MTR-10's slowest setting, and was recorded on a domestic stereo reel-to-reel machine, which recorded tracks on the tape with a different spacing from professional machine heads.
This meant locating the one and only machine left in RNZ capable of playing it. Just downstairs, luckily enough

There's a brief excerpt from this tape in part 1 of Enzology.

Some of the early dubs I made in 1998-99 were transferred from SADiE to DAT or to an HHB rackmount burner, but in the last few years I've used the PleXwriter attached to the SADiE PC.

I mentioned azimuth correction earlier and adjusting the cassette playback head. On the occasions when I've been given CD-Rs or DATs with audio already dubbed from incorrectly lined-up cassettes and tapes, I've loaded the audio into SADiE and manually re-sync'ed the left and right waveforms. The Wellington studios of RNZ now have a digital azimuth corrector made by Cedar, but it's still quicker for me to manually adjust these things than to get that particular Cedar unit couriered to me.

A couple of Neil's and Eddie's cassettes lent to me were recorded on 4-track recorders. As there were only a couple of sections I figured I'd be using in the radio programmes, I didn't bother tracking down a 4-track player and just loaded the tapes in into SADiE in stereo, with the second side playing backwards. I then reversed the backwards audio and carefully sync'ed up the tracks, using track and headphone leakage as a guide.

Having just read that explanation back to myself, it sounds crackers! But it did work and didn't take long to do.

Blah blah yack yack woof woof. Wish you hadn't asked?

Posts: 1787 | Location: Auckland, New Zealand | Registered: 29 November 2000

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