Remastering an old cassette recorded live

Pro Audio Asylum

Pro studio recording equipment and music production/industry.

Last night, I discovered a couple of cassettes of a professionally
recorded live performance, of a musical from back when I was in
high school (24 years ago already?). While listening to them,
they didn't sound too horrible, but I noticed a little distortion
and not too much tape hiss. There are a couple of things that
I'd like to try with these tapes, but my first concern is preserving
them in an analog format. The R to R tape decks that I have to play
around with include: Tascam 34B, Teac A-4300 and my cassette deck,
which sounds reasonably good for a 2-head deck, a Teac A-660
(does anyone know anything about this deck? It seems to be rather
rare). I also have a Kenwood dubbing deck (can't recall the model
number at the moment), but I don't think it's as good as the Teac
cassette deck.
When dubbing this tape, is it best to not use any sort of noise
reduction while recording? Should I use DBX-I on the Tascam?
I was thinking about just connecting
the output of the cassette deck to tracks 2 and 4 of the Tascam 34B,
with nothing in between, but then I was also thinking about perhaps
placing a noise gate between the two decks. Any thoughts on this?
The next step that I was thinking of, after having safely made a
copy or three of the cassette onto 1/4" tape, is to place
the noise gate and an equalizer between the cassette and RR
decks, after looking at the original recording with a spectrum
analyzer; alas, I don't have a parametric equalizer, or many
other signal processing toys, yet, such as a multiband ehnancer or
spectral enhancer, which I was thinking might be helpful.

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Topic - Remastering an old cassette recorded live - Thrifty Audiophile 20:44:00 01/02/03 (5)

Re: Remastering an old cassette recorded live - Joe T 06:04:22 01/03/03 (4)

Re: Remastering an old cassette recorded live - Thrifty Audiophile 20:00:16 01/03/03 (3)

Re: Remastering an old cassette recorded live - Joe T. 05:32:29 01/05/03 (2)

Aural exciters and 1/4" tape cost/quality comparison - Thrifty Audiophile 06:18:18 01/05/03 (1)

Re: Aural exciters and 1/4" tape cost/quality comparison - denverexec2001 22:44:35 01/11/03 (0)

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