"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Iain Churches wrote:
Did you really have many problems with dropouts?

Not often. But still one had to listen for them. We had
a third party client who used a British tape (Ilford Zonal)
which was not as good as BASF, Agfa or Ampex.
Copies were often going to overseas agents who
used them to cut disc masters so they had to be pristine.

The answer then is to use decent tape and cut down on the labour involved
in checking copies.

No. The answer is to do it properly. And that's what we did:-)
Every single copy was monitored, and the op (not his/her trainee)
had to sign a QC card which went into the tape box.

You cannot dictate to a customer what tape he uses
for his masters. Some of the material we handled was
from the very early fifties. Ilford was OK from new,
but did not age well. We did not see much of it.
It may also be that the material was not stored in
optimum conditions, and early editing tape oozed
adhesive

We had an excellent score library, and, if you were
doing classical copying, you could order up miniature
scores for the music you would be copying the next
day and these would be waiting in the progress room
for you first thing in the morning. So you spent the first
stage of your recording career listening to masters of
world-class classical recordings on excellent equipment, l
istening to/reading/learning the classical repertoire, and
soaking up the sound. It was amazing!

BTW, if this client master on Zonal had dropouts, just what did your
trainee do about it? (Rubbish snipped)

Every trainee worked with an experienced op who was
ultimately responsible for the material copied in his/her room.
There was also a dept supervisor who moved from room to
room during the day. It was amazingly well organised, and no
doubt very profitable:-)

If there was an anomaly, the progress room manager
was informed. He tried to get another copy, perhaps
from a B master if one was available. Otherwise, the
client would listen to and sanction the copy.
That was standard routine everywhere.

Iain

In article ,
Iain Churches wrote:
The answer then is to use decent tape and cut down on the labour
involved in checking copies.

No. The answer is to do it properly. And that's what we did:-)
Every single copy was monitored, and the op (not his/her trainee)
had to sign a QC card which went into the tape box.

Which in your rarefied world would mean every single commercial recording
was perfect in every way. ;-)

--
*Save the whale - I'll have it for my supper*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
Iain Churches wrote:
BTW, if this client master on Zonal had dropouts, just what did your
trainee do about it? (Rubbish snipped)

Every trainee worked with an experienced op who was
ultimately responsible for the material copied in his/her room.
There was also a dept supervisor who moved from room to
room during the day. It was amazingly well organised, and no
doubt very profitable:-)

Right. So to copy any tape required a trainee, an experience 'op' and a
supervisor. Does this facility still exist? ;-)

Interesting you found my question about what you would do if there was
dropout on the master tape rubbish.

Perhaps you'd have to go to the CEO for that?

--
*I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Iain Churches wrote:
The answer then is to use decent tape and cut down on the labour
involved in checking copies.

No. The answer is to do it properly. And that's what we did:-)
Every single copy was monitored, and the op (not his/her trainee)
had to sign a QC card which went into the tape box.

Which in your rarefied world would mean every single commercial recording
was perfect in every way. ;-)

What a strange assumption!

It simply means that the copy was a close as
technically possible to the original. Tape duplication
was an important part of studio activity. We had
ten rooms.

It was also a useful place for trainees to learn about
SATs, tape machine alignment, setting the phase
(with the goniometer of course:-) and Dolby
set up. Every master had an "aligngment run" at the
start. Track ID, then 1kHz (level). 15kHz for
azimuth (goniometer:-)). Then bands from 10kH
down to 50Hz for setup, top, mid and lf.

The op recorded a similar set of tones at the head of the
copy tape, using the built-in generator in the console.
That was standard practice in every major record company
in the UK, and so can hardly be described as rarefied.

Iain

In article ,
Iain Churches wrote:
It simply means that the copy was a close as
technically possible to the original. Tape duplication
was an important part of studio activity. We had
ten rooms.

Where was 'we', Iain?

--
*Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Iain Churches wrote:
BTW, if this client master on Zonal had dropouts, just what did your
trainee do about it? (Rubbish snipped)

Every trainee worked with an experienced op who was
ultimately responsible for the material copied in his/her room.
There was also a dept supervisor who moved from room to
room during the day. It was amazingly well organised, and no
doubt very profitable:-)

Right. So to copy any tape required a trainee, an experience 'op' and a
supervisor.

Each room has its own permanent op, and trainees who were
"passing through", learning tape copy, disc cutting, editing etc before
starting as assistants in the studios. These were very important training
grounds in which budding recording engineers could learn the essential
basic skills of their craft.

Interesting you found my question about what you would do if there was
dropout on the master tape rubbish.

I answered in full your question about dropouts.
It was your comment about demanding a new recording that was
rubbish.

Iain

On Tue, 14 Feb 2017 17:57:47 +0200, Iain Churches wrote:

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 12 Feb 2017 23:35:04 +0200, Iain Churches wrote:

"Jim Lesurf" wrote in message
...
In article , Iain Churches
wrote:
Prerecorded cassettes were always something of a compromise
(high-speed loop-bin duplication) but towards the end of that era,
chrome tape with Dolby B was starting to sound pretty good.

That reminds me that there was at least one company who did 'real
time'
Cassette duplications for the sake of sound quality. I can't now
recall their name(s), though. Something like "White(something"
perhaps was one of them.

There were probably many. One I know of in North London was called
"SuperCassette" (original, eh?) They had a large room with dexion
shelves floor to ceiling with two or three realtime high-end cassette
recorders (Nakamichi or something similar) on each shelf. Each
"aisle"
was fed by its own "master recorder" (Revox A77) with a studio copy of
the master running at 15 ips. The cassettes sounded quite good!


I wonder, seeing as they were going to such an extreme, whether they
also ran the master and slaves in reverse to mitigate the phase delay
'distortion' effect on low frequency square wave test signals which
made such test signals look like triangle waves on playback when viewed
on an oscilloscope, or did they just accept that despite this very
visible departure from the original waveshape, no one could distinguish
the direct versus the phase distorted magnetic recording playback by
ear alone anyway? :-)

The system was a simple one, and only needed two young girls operators
to keep it running. As soon as the EOT switch clicked on the Revox one
of them walked along the row, ejecting the cassettes and putting in new
ones.
The other dabbed the Revox replay head with a spot of Isoprop, rewound
the"master" and then helped with the casette replacement.

I would hope the other YL would have done a *lot* more than just dab the
replay head alone with a "spot of isopropyl alcohol". Never mind the
replay head, you also have to decontaminate the rest of the tape path
components (guides, capstain(s), pinchwheel(s), erase and record heads,
*everything* the master tape has to negotiate in its transit between the
supply and take up reels) even when using the modern Japanese Maxell and
TDK master tape formulations which showed up the deficiencies of EMI,
Ampex and Scotch tape formulations that had once been regarded as leaders
in magnetic tape technology.

Even the cassette recording slaves needed similar levels of TLC, even if
it was administered more sparingly (perhaps every second or third
cassette's worth of duty).

In a matter of minutes they were ready to go again. There was a pair of
headphones connected to the Revox (QC ?) I did not see them used.

They probably relied on spot checks of the cassette dubs, rarely needing
to audition the master playback quality unless they were attempting to
copy from a master made using Philips tape which had a tendency to clog
ordinary Mu-metal heads in less than 1800 feet of tape ime (the only tape
decks capable of getting a clean playback in a single pass of 1800/2400
foot reels of Philips tape were those blessed with glass crystal heads
such as the Akai GX630DB and the GX747 decks I used (and still own).

BTW, when I mentioned "low frequency square wave test signals", I meant
frequencies in the range 300 to 900 Hz, which I think might be better
described as 'mid frequency' rather than low - my bad.

The point being that they'd be safely above the low frequency cut off
point of any decent amplifier or tape deck whilst still allowing odd
harmonics up to at least the 7th to be reproduced below the typical 16 to
22KHz high frequency cut off point of a high quality cassette or reel to
reel deck.

Passing a 1KHz square wave through a typical amplifier with a 20 to 20K
Hz frequency response would retain the original waveshape as examined on
an oscilloscope, albeit with ripples and rounded shoulders due to the
limited bandwidth. Playing back such a test wave from a magnetic
recording boasting a similar overall frequency response to that of the
reference amplifier would show the classic triangularisation distortion
effect typical of magnetic recordings.

"Distortion" that was distressingly visible on an oscilloscope trace yet
a seemingly inaudible form of distortion. I guess there was some concern
over allowing this form of distortion to 'multiply' when creating second
generation dubs, hence the trick of running the master and the slaves in
reverse to successfully largely cancel this "visible on a 'scope trace"
effect on the 2nd gen copies themselves.

The last words I recall reading in regard of this phenomena was the
phrase, "Thankfully, our ears seem totally insensitive to phase delay
distortion." so I guess such 'phase distortion" correction measures as
dubbing in reverse were never (widely, if ever) adopted. I only mentioned
it in case anyone had had any experience of using this technique to
achieve the "best possible" quality dubs from analogue master tapes.

These days, any such phase distortions in original tape recordings can
now be dealt with using DSP technology, a technology that was becoming
available to the music industry with the advent of the Compact Disk in
the early 80s. I'm guessing the technique of reverse dubbing would have
had only a narrow window of ascendency of less than a decade between the
advent of the music-cassette and that of the Compact Disk.

--
Johnny B Good

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 14 Feb 2017 17:57:47 +0200, Iain Churches wrote:

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 12 Feb 2017 23:35:04 +0200, Iain Churches wrote:

"Jim Lesurf" wrote in message
...
In article , Iain Churches
wrote:
Prerecorded cassettes were always something of a compromise
(high-speed loop-bin duplication) but towards the end of that era,
chrome tape with Dolby B was starting to sound pretty good.

That reminds me that there was at least one company who did 'real
time'
Cassette duplications for the sake of sound quality. I can't now
recall their name(s), though. Something like "White(something"
perhaps was one of them.

There were probably many. One I know of in North London was called
"SuperCassette" (original, eh?) They had a large room with dexion
shelves floor to ceiling with two or three realtime high-end cassette
recorders (Nakamichi or something similar) on each shelf. Each
"aisle"
was fed by its own "master recorder" (Revox A77) with a studio copy of
the master running at 15 ips. The cassettes sounded quite good!


I wonder, seeing as they were going to such an extreme, whether they
also ran the master and slaves in reverse to mitigate the phase delay
'distortion' effect on low frequency square wave test signals which
made such test signals look like triangle waves on playback when viewed
on an oscilloscope, or did they just accept that despite this very
visible departure from the original waveshape, no one could distinguish
the direct versus the phase distorted magnetic recording playback by
ear alone anyway? :-)

The system was a simple one, and only needed two young girls operators
to keep it running. As soon as the EOT switch clicked on the Revox one
of them walked along the row, ejecting the cassettes and putting in new
ones.
The other dabbed the Revox replay head with a spot of Isoprop, rewound
the"master" and then helped with the casette replacement.

I would hope the other YL would have done a *lot* more than just dab the
replay head alone with a "spot of isopropyl alcohol". Never mind the
replay head, you also have to decontaminate the rest of the tape path
components (guides, capstain(s), pinchwheel(s), erase and record heads,
*everything* the master tape has to negotiate in its transit between the
supply and take up reels) even when using the modern Japanese Maxell and
TDK master tape formulations which showed up the deficiencies of EMI,
Ampex and Scotch tape formulations that had once been regarded as leaders
in magnetic tape technology.

None of the cassette decks received any TLC in the
short time I watched the process. Though without
doubt they had a more thorough cleaning regime after
a fixed number of passes.

The master machines at the head of each aisle were
started at intervals, so that as soon as the tape finished
they were busy reloading, before moving to the next
aisle where the master was in the last few turns,
and repeating the process.

As the production level was far below that of a loop
bin system, it would have been interested to know how
much extra they could charge per cassette for enhanced
quality, and real-time copying.


Iain