Digitizing Cassettes
Reply #3 – 2011-07-24 22:55:41
To add to what Andy said about used decks, I would strongly recommend going with a single cassette deck - dual-decks are pretty much guaranteed to be of lower quality as they were built solely for the convenience of copying. Also, try to find one with adjustable azimuth, which is the angle of the head relative to the tape itself. This is easy to confirm as there will be two small holes in the bottom center of the door. This will allow you to tweak the azimuth for each tape in order to get the cleanest possible sound. Yes, there are "proper" procedures for aligning azimuth to a test tape, but in your case, it's exactly the opposite: you have a large quantity of tapes from unknown sources, so all you care about is getting the best possible sound from each tape, regardless of whether or not it adheres to any "standard." As such, you'd just be tweaking by ear, and it's pretty obvious when you've hit the "sweet spot" - any adjustment in either direction will sound decidedly worse. Edit: Oh, one more thing: look for a clean pinch roller! That's the little black rubber wheel to the right of the head. A little bit of oxide buildup is normal, but if you see a distinct brown stripe on it, it's toast, and, short of tearing the deck apart and replacing it, there's nothing you can do about it. Dirty pinch rollers will manifest themselves in major wow and flutter issues, particularly flutter.