Why are capstan wheels different size?

All those mechanical means of reproducing sound - wax disks, tinfoil, shellac, plastic, wire, tape - were all awful. Chemical photography was a nuisance, too. Ditto typing and carbon paper.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Yeah but look at the bit-error rate you can tolerate. A CD would be worth less with that many errors.

Cheers

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gotta have a source platform in order to digitize all that media...

If your source material is on tape, it's on tape, end of story.

I don't buy the inside vs outside of belt thing.

NT

** See:

The heads are all 4 track - correct ?

So no head spinning needed.

.... Phil

** I agree.

Where the drive belt is curved, the outside radius is greater - but both flywheels are on the INSIDE of curves.

.... Phil

** There was one genuinely hi-fi, analogue tape recorder available to the public. The Hi-Fi VCR, which came in Beta and VHS versions.

Recordings were made with a pair of FM carriers in the MHz range. S/n ratio approached 90dB while all the other shortcomings of tape were rendered negligible. Up to 6 hours recording on one cassette too.

Some studios used them as master recorders cos they outperformed R-R machines by such a large margin.

Odd how they never caught on in this role.

... Phil

I was taught the same thing about the HiFi VCRs. Never did any testing with it though. Reel to reel units were more fun to play with.

Sony TC-WR99ES.

innenleben_1715

2-track heads, spinning for autoreverse.

If I recall (it?s been a few decades...) Sony didn?t make a dual mech machine with 4-track head. It was available in single mech only. My priority at the time was doing extended recordings (record on mech A, automatically continue on mech B) so dual it was.

ines by such a large margin."

And others did not because of their limitations. A buzz is nice when sittin g around with your olady listening to some shit. It is not so nice when you are trying to make a master recording.

All AFM hifi recording techniques sufferred from the buzz. they got rid of it with DBX but if you got ears you can still hear it. Noise reduction does ot get rid of the noise - it just asks it or puts up the sound to mask it. Then compensates on playback.

I have had both beta and VHS hifi decks, many of them in fact. I have had t hem both brand new out of the box. I also had some connections to the manuf acturer (Sony) and the bottom line was, if I didn't like the audio performe nce they would refund my money. There was NOTHING they could do about the b uzz.

This would be at 60 Hz or at 50 Hz across the pond. There simply was no way to splice the AFM back together after the head switching. the people who d esigned the depth multiplexing bullshit and put the extra heads on the VHS decks because they didn't have the bandwidth didn't get much farther either . What's more, their idea made the picture quality worse. In beta hifi, the modifications actually made the picture quality better.VHS had to catch up . And still beta was the better format.

I used one as a mixdown recorder. Painful - the transport was dog slow to change states. You fast-forwarded and rewound at your peril ( although keeping notes on the index counter minimized that ).

The one I had also had an AGC you could not defeat. Some did, some didn't.

They also require some sort of valid video signal when recording.

--
Les Cargill

No! The old VHS HiFi recorder I had years ago actually had a separate audio-only recording mode where it could generate everything it required itself (I think some dummy sync was generated) and the signal levels were somehow altered so the margins for dropouts were higher.

Still it was only useful to make recordings of concerts and play them back entirely, not to skip back and forth all the time.

I had the JVC 725 which could record Hi-Fi FM audio only at half speed for 8 hours on a 4 h VHS cassette. You could overwrite the longitudinal track with 8 h Lo-Fi recording, so you could have 16 h of audio on a 4 h cassette.

It was also a nice monitor recorder (required by the law) to record the transmission from a radio stallion (FM to the right, AM transmitter to the left channel) for 8 hours and due to the simple mechanical handling, even the station currently active DJ could change the cassette every 8 hours, instead of requiring some open reel tape changes.

Most likely. It's kind of interesting that they thought about that.

--
Les Cargill

I can't think of a single method of 'reproducing sound' that doesn't involve mechanical means.

Sound is a mechanical phenomenon. Humans use flapping meat.

Perhaps you mean recording? No, still mechanical. Storage? Maybe.

Of course, there's nothing mechanical in electronics, is there...

It's the programme material, the idea and its conception that's important; not the means of conveyance.

RL

I can imagine a method that used heat to move the air, perhaps with a plasma to make it fast. (Like a modulated lightning flash.) But I cannot be bothered to construct a search to find out if it has been done successfully...

Mike.

I recall a conversation from years ago with a *VERY* old theater projectionist, who spoke of what he called "flame speakers". Don't know if it was an artifact of his (at the time) 80+ year old mind going, or reality, but what he described made sense to me on several levels, though I've never bothered to try chasing it down. Apparently, back in the early days of talkies, one method of sound production involved a gas nozzle (unsure if he meant gasoline, or something like propane/LP gas) "tuned" to produce a blue flame (he was very clear on that point - lots of the conversation came back to how he had to tinker with the flame at each showing, otherwise the sound wasn't good) several feet tall in a combustion chamber, into which was shoved a set of tungsten electrodes. The 'trodes were driven at high voltages by any of several amplification methods (frequently varying by theater, if the old guy's tale was to be believed) to charge the plasma of the flame, which apparently caused it to "dance", driving a diaphragm like that of a speaker. Supposedly, amazingly high volumes with very good fidelity could be achieved.

Like I say, I've never actually gone to the effort of tracking it down, and I have no idea if it was a failing mind's invention, or reality, but... Seems to me like it COULD work.

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Security provided by Mssrs Smith and/or Wesson. Brought to you by the letter Q

I heard from many girls that size doesn't matter !! LOL

See Thermoachoustic Technology.

RL