From: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org (idealcopy-digest) To: idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Subject: idealcopy-digest V4 #102 Reply-To: idealcopy@smoe.org Sender: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk idealcopy-digest Wednesday, April 4 2001 Volume 04 : Number 102 Today's Subjects: ----------------- RE: [idealcopy] RE: Does anyone still collect cassettes? [Paul Pietromona] RE: [idealcopy] RE: Does anyone still collect cassettes? [fernando ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 17:35:22 -0700 From: Paul Pietromonaco Subject: RE: [idealcopy] RE: Does anyone still collect cassettes? > The big mistake made by people using chrome tape though, >was to play back the tape with the selector switched to chrome. The bias for >chrome tape should be set when RECORDING and not on playback. When playing >chrome tapes, the bias should be set to "normal" tapes. > Okay - Being the electrical and audio engineer that I am, I have to clarify a couple of things here. (^_^) Due to the strange magnetic, non-linear behavior of tape, you cannot put a signal down on tape and play it back "straight" - that is, without frequency modification. You have to modify the signal being recorded to "shoehorn" it into the limited space available on tape. (Especially cassette tape - less applicable with reel-to-reel). The way this is done is by boosting the high frequencies during recording, and lowering them during playback. Officially, we call this equalization or EQ. Bias, on the other hand, is an ultra high frequency signal that is added to the signal being recorded to improve the frequency response. How it does this exactly is beyond the scope of this email (believe me! - - the math is bizarre for this!!) but you add it during recording and it is not heard during playback. If you "overbias" a tape, it sounds dull and has too much bass, and if you "underbias" a tape it sounds too bright and weak in bass. You need to hit the correct bias point for the type of magnetic particle you're recording with. So, originally, there was one type of tape. What we call "Normal" or Type I. This had a EQ of 120 uSecs and used what we call Normal bias. When chrome tape or Type II was developed, it required a higher bias signal. At the same time, Dolby Labs along with the major tape deck manufacturers decided to change the EQ to 70 uSecs. What this did was boost the high frequencies even higher during recording and cut them back even lower during playback, reducing the overall noise of the tape. (Since noise is constant and independent of the signal being recorded, this trick works.) However, cassettes are notoriously finicky about head alignment and bias. The 70 uSec EQ exaggerated errors in calibration even more than 120 uSec EQ. So, since most people's home cassette deck alignment doesn't match the cassette duplicator's alignment, the 70 uSec EQ sounds bad, and pre-recorded tapes were made with Type I (normal) tape to get the 120 uSec EQ. However, some bright people figured out that if they used the high energy chrome tape formulations, with Chrome bias, but set the EQ to 120 uSecs ("Normal" EQ), then you would get a much more accurate sound on regular tape decks. Thus, the Chrome 120 uSec EQ pre-recorded cassette was born. By the way - this is why Dolby noise reduction (Dolby B type noise reduction in this case) sounds so bad on pre-recorded cassettes. Calibration is the main culprit here. Not only are the head alignment mismatches causing problems, but the Dolby signal levels have to be precisely calibrated between the record deck and the playback deck, or errors in sound will result. Also, most Type I tapes can't handle the extra high energy of Dolby noise reduction very well, resulting in dull sound - especially considering the cheap tapes that most duplicators use. Dolby HX Pro fixed this problem slightly - dynamically modifying the bias during recording to allow cheap Type I tapes to sound like high quality chrome tapes - but you still had the calibration and head alignment problems to deal with, which relegated pre-recorded tapes to the distant "also-ran" of fidelity. We won't even go into Dolby C or Dolby S....(^_^) Cheers, Paul P.S. I used to listen to a lot of cassettes - why do you ask? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 17:58:21 -0700 From: fernando Subject: RE: [idealcopy] RE: Does anyone still collect cassettes? At 05:35 PM 4/3/01 -0700, Paul Pietromonaco wrote: >We won't even go into Dolby C or Dolby S....(^_^) oh maaaaaan!... I expected to get into dbx as well... better than "dobly" ;-) - -f. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 02:40:31 +0100 From: Tim Robinson Subject: [idealcopy] Cassettes & Record Collecting in general Paul Rabjohn wrote: must say test pressings are one of those things i can't get worked up about. like cassettes. does anyone collect cassettes? still wish i'd got that 8-track though.p I don't 'collect' records as such. I used to buy everything on tape when I was a kid so I could listen to it straight away on my walkman on the bus home from town....I needed an instant hit I guess! Thats one of the reasons I hardly ever buy Vinyl.....I'm still a walkman addict its just that the format has moved on! Child of the 80s you see! I'm left with a legacy of some of my favourite records from my teenage years being on crappy little tapes, some of which have been chewed up in various car stereos or just worn out (Screamadelica, the second Orbital LP that kind of thing) However the one great by-product of this period in my life must be the Factory Records tapes. The ones that came in a generic fabric covered box about the size of a videotape, colour coded according to the artist (Brilliant white for New Order, dark blue for ACR, purple for Joy Division (why not black?!), Burgandy red for Durutti Column , Sunny-Delight orange for the Happy Mondays, Sea blue for Quando Quango, I think the Section 25 ones were dark green....anyone know any others?). The cover was always the same, blank cover with just the artist, title and Fac-number underneath in the same Font. Inside was the tape encased in a plastic moulding, and a postcard with a reduction of the LP sleeve on it. Power, Corruption & Lies has an actual postcard from the National Gallery of the painting used for the sleeve and then a black plastic insert with the track listing and credits embossed in silver lettering...mmmmm! The tape itself bore only the Factory catalogue number to identify itself. And for some reason they never removed the 'Write Protect' tabs from the tape so if you weren't careful you could accidentally wipe the tape! Not such a bad thing in some cases! They also did a great one for ACRs Graveyard and Ballroom in a clear plastic wallet with the tape loose inside, an ex-girlfreind years ago had one which I used to covet! (Her older sister knew ACR and got me signed copy of the boxed version to compensate!) The only other really decent cassette I can think of is the one for Stereolabs Peng! album which is in a normal case but has a half size inlay which only covers the bottom of the box so the tape sticks out of the top. That was one of the main reasons I bought it when it came out and they have entertained me ever since! But generally I'm not a record collector at all. I cannot see what possible reason anyone would have for paying #69 for a test pressing of '154'. I'm not bothered about rarities unless they have music on that isn't available anywhere else. I'm more excited by the prospect of getting a new CD thats come out that week than hunting for old rarities and I find the whole record dealing thing a bit of a rip off. For example I'd quite like to own all the early My Bloody Valentine stuff but I refuse to line some greedy dealers' pockets for the old vinly copies...I'll just wait for the inevitable CD box-set that will follow the 'Loveless' 20th Anniversary special edition sometime in 2012! Plenty of new stuff to buy while I wait! Even so I can't resist the occasional record fair, if only to marvel at the fact that dealers will try and charge some poor sod #50 for things like mis-pressings!!! "Oh wow here's a Pet Shop Boys 12" of Its a Sin that acccidentally had a Reynolds Girls track pressed on the B-side! ". I do sometimes look at things like say an original vinyl version of a Dome LP and ponder getting it just for the wonderful sleeve but alas ones budget cannot stretch to such things. Last one I went to I got Kevin Edens Wire book and some great postcards which was made it worthwhile. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 22:21:26 -0500 (CDT) From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: [idealcopy] The Cage of Music The article on John Cage is, I think, very relevant to some of the approaches of Wire: http://solo1.home.mindspring.com/4min33se.htm I found this quote in particular fascinating in regard to the "amateur" aspect of punk and Wire's insistence that they are non-musicians: "Not having, as most musicians do, an ear for music, I don't hear music when I write it. I hear it only when it is played. If I heard it when I was writing it, I would write what I've already heard; whereas since I can't hear it while I'm writing it, I'm able to write something that I've never heard before. . . . . And if I did hear something before it was audible, I would have had to take solfege, which would have trained me to accept certain pitches and not others. I would then have found the environmental sounds off tune, lacking tonality. Therefore, I pay no attention to solfege." Actually, I think it's harder than that: even if you don't know, formally, how to create music, you're acculturated to the conventional sorts of procedures so that, nearly inevitably, if you pick up an instrument, you reproduce what you've already heard. There's a trap there, though: if you rigorously avoid reproducing what you've already heard, that "already heard" becomes a negative restriction, a cutout nearly audible, of the strenuously avoided (this is a problem I have with most so-called free jazz: if it were truly free, it wouldn't so carefully avoid conventional harmony, rhythm, development). I tend to think that, unless you're *truly* in Cage's mindset vis a vis the music of the world and nature, you're better off coming up with ways to avoid both of those traps. Formal structures can actually help (such as Wire's composing a song whose chord sequence is based on the names of stops along a train line, if I remember my Eden correctly), in that they allow arbitrary determination to move you past your preconceptions *and* a too-cautious avoidance of same. (And now we're approaching Eno's Oblique Strategies...and certainly Eno was strongly influenced by Cage.) Enough for now. - --Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html ::Any noise that is unrelenting eventually becomes music:: __Paula Carino__ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 20:27:20 -0700 From: jeffh@artnet.net (Jeff Hall) Subject: [idealcopy] RE:OT Cabaret Voltaire Cabs had an interesting track on a flexi 7" single "Over and Over" b/w "Input Out" by Technoville '82, which was also a good track. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:29:25 +0200 From: "giluz" Subject: [idealcopy] RE: Unnecessary Punk Theory > These days the multinational owned record companies > seem so confused that they wouldn't know a new style > or genre if it planted a bomb in the A&R office waste > paper basket! Was there a time when it was not like that? giluz ------------------------------ End of idealcopy-digest V4 #102 *******************************