"Phil Allison" wrote in message
...
I once had a customer who owned a small recoding studio ( he was able to
cut disks on an old Ampex lathe too) and he had made a short musical tape
in stereo to be played on FM radio as a commercial.

Did Ampex make a cutting lathe? Perhaps you mean Westrex?

Ampex was set up to market the new technology (analogue tape)
which the German company AEG with their Magnetophon had
shown to be so superior to disc recording.

I have always understood that there were three American
manufacters were, Scully, Westrex and Presto.
There were also firms making portable disc cutters,
the size of gramophones - among them Vitaphone in the
US and Grampian in the UK

In Europe, Neumann and Lyrec were the two major
manufacturers of cutting lathes for professional use.


He rang me in a panic one day saying the FM station had rejected his tape,
claiming is was "out of phase". So I went to the studio, checked his set
up and listened to the tape on headphones. When switched to mono it
sounded fine, so was not out of phase.

I then rang the FM station and eventually go onto the guy who had
condemned the tape. He explained that his stereo modulation monitor showed
the tape was OOP.

When pressed for more detail he grudgingly went on to say that the L
channel meter regularly a read higher than the sum meter and this meant it
was OOP.

The problem was simple: my customer has panned the bass guitar hard left
in the mix, the piano hard right and drums in the centre.

That would have been OK if the modulation level was
not too high. BGtr and Bass Drum (also Floor Tom) would
have been safer in the centre or Bass Phased at the console

He re-mixed the tape with bass in the CENTRE and it got played on air.

The safest and most sensible solution of all:-)

But why supply an acetate when a quarter inch stereo tape
would have been much easier and cheaper?

Many folk groups, (example vox, guitar and string bass)
were recorded with the guitar left, vocal centre
and bass right.

Iain