Quote:
Originally Posted by dbbubba  You can use an improper speed MRL tape if you use Jay's table.
It'll be close enough, but you need to buy a proper tape.
You can't make your own tape because any inherent probelems with your machine will just multuply.
It is called a reference STANDARD because you are referencing to a standard set by MRL which is a very controlled set of parameters.
You can't really use the machine that you are aligning as a it's own standard.
Also, all you really need is a short alignment tape with 10k, 1k and 100hz to align almost ANY analog deck. It is nice to have middle freqs. like 2.5k and 5k when aligning decks like an Ampex ATR102, but most decks just require those three. A short tape should cost under $350.00 new from MRL.
A sweep tape is kinda' difficult to use on a mutitrack.
Also, the longer the sections with tones are, the longer the tape will last and be accurate. If you have to keep hitting autolocate to go to the beginning of a freq. section then you are running the tape that many times! You can't just say that you used it once... no, you ran the tape over the heads more than once!
Soes STL still exist?
Danny Brown |
On the high end, I would want to have 5k, 10k, 15k and 20k as a minimum. 100 Hz on an alignment tape is often useless if the tape isn't compensated for fringing. For that matter, I never even use any tones below 1k on an alignment tape (except sometimes to search out a failure, and here a flux loop can be an even better tool) and instead do the LF EQ tweaks during the record step, per the procedure that Jay McKnight outlines in his various papers at the MRL website. That is how I was taught to do it back in 1972, and Jay still concurs! <g>
What I referred to as a "chromatic sweep" tape has a series of "do re mi..." tone steps versus fixed steps at 1k, 2k, 4k, etc. I like the chromatic sweeps.
Once a given machine "has been dragged kicking and screaming" into an original decent alignment condition (THAT is where the ful- length tapes come in handy), then the shorter tapes will work just fine.
Bri