| I had an interesting experience with this issue when we bought a new 24 track machine for the Quicksilver Messenger Service studio.
I insisted that one of the former Wally Heider technicians perform the initial tape path alignment on the machine. We quickly determined from the level of instability that tape had been run on the new heads without them being properly aligned. (This is equivalent to running brand new tires on a car without a steering alignment or wheel balance. The dealer got to eat most of their profit paying for the replacement set of heads.)
Now that we finally had a new machine that was working properly, something the tech from the dealer had never seen before, we made ourselves a set of tones for 15 and 30.
We had a number of projects in from the major LA rooms and I was pleased to see their tones almost perfectly matched our tones. Unfortunately this wasn't the case with the local mid level San Francisco rooms. Virtually every set of tones we got in no matter which local studio it came from had the very same tracks all screwed up and this tone "virus" continued for years without anybody noticing or, obviously owning an alignment tape! |