Any chance one of those 'car adapters' might be helpful in aligning a deck? An idea (PLEASE comment!)

Tape Trail

Reel to reel, cassette and other analogue tape formats.

Hi everyone. I truly hope this won't be another of those posts that goes unanswered.
I got the idea this morning, that one of those cassette adapters for use in car decks (there was a thread just yesterday about them) could maybe be useful in aligning a deck.
I don't have a scope, don't know anyone who does, and don't have any proper (ie. commercial) test/alignment tapes either. The closest I can get is by asking someone with a 'known-good' deck to make a tape of pink/white noise and test tones for me.
Yesterday I tried my hand at it with one such tape, containing 1 kHz and 10 kHz tones, feeding the deck's output into something called "PC-Scope" or something like that; it's a simple freeware app for Windows that 'turns [your] PC into an oscilloscope'.
The problem with that approach is that, even within the audio band, the cheapness of [most] PC hardware adds a BIG margin of tolerance. So while I could 'get the hang' of the process, I couldn't get anywhere close to proper alignment.
This was aggravated further by the fact that the tape I'd recorded the test tones on wasn't of the highest quality.
I also tried the 'out-of-phase pink noise' method (by ear), which is 'friendlier' to those of us without 'scopes, but felt like I couldn't home in 100% on proper alignment - the fact that there's moving tape involved makes the whole thing a bit unsteady, ultimately.
So I thought 'well, those cassette adapters have a head right where the tape would be, and they must be at least minimally aligned. What if I popped one of those into the deck, fed it the same signal (tones, noise, whatever) I was recording on those tapes and aligned against THAT? No moving tape, should be a lot more steady than what I've been doing. '
And I thought I'd post here, to see what you guys think. I'd truly appreciate any help, comments, advice, opinions, etc.
I've got a couple more ideas involving those cassette adapter gizmos, but this is the one I'd like to tackle first.
Thanks!

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Topic - Any chance one of those 'car adapters' might be helpful in aligning a deck? An idea (PLEASE comment!) - Damián 05:35:43 02/16/06 (3)

Flux loop - Doc B. 10:26:06 02/16/06 (0)

I dunno... - soundnut 07:36:23 02/16/06 (1)

Re: Good point(s). I wonder where I'd find "a good alignment tape from a reputable manufacturer" down here though. (n - Damián 09:18:02 02/16/06 (0)

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