Recent Finds & Thoughts

From: Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com <(Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com)>
Date: Tue Dec 1 03:45:28 1998

>> Possibly. But I distinctly recall that when we recorded tapes for sale
>> using the tape deck from my Sanyo stereo (not on a PET BTW - this was a
BBC
>> micro) we found that Dolby noise reduction had to be disabled for it to
>> work...
>
> Did you try recroding with Dolby and then replaying on a machine with
> Dolby noise reduction (turned on), or replaying on the normal cheap
> cassette recorder that you use with computers? If the former, then I am
> not suprised it didn't work - the frequency response would have been
> rather odd. The latter should have worked, though.

We didn't try recording with Dolby and playing back without. I'd be very
surprised if that worked (did you mean it that way round). I can't
remember if we recorded with and played back with - I imagine that would
work - but we definitely couldn't get it to work recording without and
playing back with, although this actually works quite well for music.

> I would be suprised if you couldn't make a CD that could be loaded. I
> can't try it because I have no way of writing to a CD.

I never meant to imply that you couldn't make a CD that could be loaded.
What I meant was you probably have to be more sophisticated than old
cassette -> digitised audio -> audio CD. I'd recommend old cassette ->
signal restoration -> digital signal (0s and 1s sampled at some highish
speed) -> possibly prefilter to pre-emptively undo the CD player's output
filter -> digitised audio -> audio CD.

For PET (and family) tapes a C2N would probably make a good cassette
machine for playing it initially, since it does some of the signal
restoration itself.

Philip.
Received on Tue Dec 01 1998 - 03:45:28 GMT