Audio cassette alignment revisited

captainvideo462009 · 2014-03-17T15:00:55+00:00

I've recently been resurrecting some of my old Audio cassette recorders. Th ey are all high quality machines and work very well, but I know (particular ly in the case of the Teac), which is about 40 years old, that every one of them could probably benefit from a touch up alignment. A few months back I went searching for an alignment tape. I found used, and /or what claims to be NOS, and Chinese new, but none of these are anything that I'd be willing to put any faith in. When I last looked there was a com pany which still makes these and there is also apparently something "hand m ade" by some individual on what he claims to be "professional equipment". H owever the cost for both of these is exorbitant. And I don't know anything about either of these sources. Other than those choices there is nothing out there that I would want to us e. These alignment tapes used to be available from manufacturers like Sony and Nakamichi, and they were relatively inexpensive but unfortunately those have not been manufactured for many years. The problem is without doing a reproduce alignment first there is no way to to properly align a machine. I was discussing this with a friend recently and he came up with an idea. T hey make, or used to make anyway these adapters in the shape of an audio ca ssette tape. They were mostly used in vehicles who's radios only had a cass ette unit I think. The adapter had a tape "head" of sorts and it had a cabl e coming out of the top of the adapter that had either two RCA males or a 3 .5mm stereo plug on the end. You could plug this end into the output of an IPOD or whatever and the adapter's head would induce a signal onto the cass ette players head. I guess this unit must have employed the NAB characteris tic curve because the ones I've heard always sounded pretty good to me. I can probably dig up a couple of these around here, feed signals from my g enerator into it but I know that these adapters were never very expensive s o I have to...

Mar 17, 2014 45 Replies

Rate this thread:

dave 12 years ago

Oddly, The decode part of "A" is still used today as a single ended noise reduction device.

Vote

josephkk 12 years ago

All of the Dolby systems are level sensitive. They are band selective compressors after all. The dbx system is just a compressor system but not band selective. Lately they have been leaving off the decompressors and chaining the compressors.

?-(

Vote

josephkk 12 years ago

calibration

Hot damn, that is a good price. Too bad i can't contact them.

?-(

Vote

josephkk 12 years ago

aligned a

least 6dB

supposed to

calibration

Cool, The AX-300 headstacks are fully screw adjustable, which is an interesting tradeoff. The electronics is still stock, so playback is NAB.

?-)

Vote

dave 12 years ago

If you can use a laser or something to get the gap perfectly perpendicular to the deck you'll be surprisingly close. Are your reel motors behaving?

Vote

josephkk 12 years ago

aligned a

at least 6dB

supposed to

get an

calibration

NAB.

So far. There are adjustable tapped power resistors that i can use to keep them performing in the proper range should i need them. I would have to lightly sand them to endure good contact if was to adjust them. I keep them lubricated as standard maintenance.

A quality calibration tape would allow me to set the headstacks up properly though.

?-)

Vote

Join the Discussion

Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.

Didn't find your answer?

Ask the community — no account required