I'm told that there are now about thirty different makers of pre-recorded tapes.
Consider what could happen if any one of them were to start placing two minutes of calibration tones at the head of each reel.
Their customers might object. Perhaps quite strongly! After all, they're paying for recorded music, not for calibration tones.
But on the other hand, where is there any quantifiable quality assurance of the final product? (For that matter, how can we even check azimuth?)
The solution is to use smarter tones. This means that the information is put there for those who wish to extract and use it. Yet, it's also not objectionable (in length) for those who choose to ignore it.
Smarter obviously means NOT using a series of widely spaced discrete frequencies (and certainly not any tones of thirty seconds duration per frequency, as was commonly done by old school recording engineers in the 1960's and 70's).
No, we'd use much, much faster sweeps instead. Those sweeps could then be ingested (and stored digitally) for subsequent analysis. We'd then have meaningful quality assurance (accessible by independent measurement performed by the end user) and the important ability to accurately align the user's tape playback equipment to a given tape. That would be a true, high-end approach to analog tape playback.
We've had the technology for doing this for more than 35 years. Are any of the pre-recorded tape makers using it?
Consider what could happen if any one of them were to start placing two minutes of calibration tones at the head of each reel.
Their customers might object. Perhaps quite strongly! After all, they're paying for recorded music, not for calibration tones.
But on the other hand, where is there any quantifiable quality assurance of the final product? (For that matter, how can we even check azimuth?)
The solution is to use smarter tones. This means that the information is put there for those who wish to extract and use it. Yet, it's also not objectionable (in length) for those who choose to ignore it.
Smarter obviously means NOT using a series of widely spaced discrete frequencies (and certainly not any tones of thirty seconds duration per frequency, as was commonly done by old school recording engineers in the 1960's and 70's).
No, we'd use much, much faster sweeps instead. Those sweeps could then be ingested (and stored digitally) for subsequent analysis. We'd then have meaningful quality assurance (accessible by independent measurement performed by the end user) and the important ability to accurately align the user's tape playback equipment to a given tape. That would be a true, high-end approach to analog tape playback.
We've had the technology for doing this for more than 35 years. Are any of the pre-recorded tape makers using it?