Another day of recording records

Posted by Braxus (A) on May 25, 2007 at 19:57:27

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I mainly use my tape decks to record vinyl, which helps keep it in the analog domain and less wear and tear on the records.

Being I've been experimenting with a lot of premium normal tapes lately, I looked in my box for any DX-3 or DX-4 Denon's I just bought a bunch of those off Ebay today, so they are on their way. But I wasn't sure I already had one of these from older auctions I've done. Anyway there weren't any of those Denon tapes, but I did find a BASF Ferro Super LH SM. This apparently was a midrange type 1 tape, a step above the LH tapes. See below.

http://www.melofanas.lt/1left/kol/BASF/BASF_left_LH_super_SM_I_60.jpg

Anyways I decided "Well its better then bottom line type 1", so I took it with me. I had some Frank Sinatra LPs I wasn't too concerned about using the best tapes on, so this tape would do. I set up my Sony tape deck. Fast forwarded the tape to the middle. Punched in calibration. Wow. This tape IS old. I had almost no signal on the highs with the bias at 0. Lots of drop out on the tape too. I turned the bias all the way to -20. Wow- still not there. So I turned the record EQ to high. That helped. I was at 8 oclock then. Test record. The high end was still low. So I turned the bias again all the way to -20, while keeping the rec EQ to high. Finally the tape was "almost" where its supposed to be. I noticed the high end was still lower in the left channel then the right. I wasn't too concerned about these two records, so I went ahead and did the copy. Some distortion in the right channel at times, but for the most part acceptable. I noticed the levels seemed to be slightly lower too. Oh well. I got the recording done. Its acceptable enough to listen too for background music. The low end record noise seemed to hover around -20db, so there wasn't much dynamic range to use. I basically got the idea the tape aged so much that its worse then any normal tape BASF could make. I have used LH-EI tapes before. Those were better then this.

So just in case anyone sees these BASF Super tapes on the 'Bay, I would only buy them to collect. Anyone else get tapes off auction sites and have similar issues?

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Topic - Another day of recording records - Braxus 19:57:27 05/25/07 (0)

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