Erase Head Question

CrowsofFritz

CrowsofFritz

Flamingo!
Hello all, I know very little about analog setups, so I thought I'd ask here.

My question is, on this John Frusciante song, one can hear pretty much a really faint lead vocal about a second or two before the actual lead comes in. I know this album was recorded on a tape machine. I'm going to guess that this faint track might have been an earlier take that wasn't erased fully. Is something like that possible?

Here's the song. The very faint audio starts around 0:55, right before, "the gods of the city"...

03 - John Frusciante - Anne (Curtains) - YouTube


Also, here's another song on the same album with the same problem. It starts around 0:30 right before, "and all of the world"...


07 - John Frusciante - Your Warning (Curtains) - YouTube
 
I didn't listen, but it's more likely to be print through where the signal on one part of the tape is picked up by an adjacent layer of tape on the reel.
 
Yeah...BSG is right...it's print through.

Hot tracks,sitting wound for a long time,possibly not tails out...etc....and the tracks' magnetism prints "through" the tape to a point different spot on due to the tape windings...
...kinda like wet ink does when you fold paper.
 
You used to get this a lot on albums (vinyl) if you listen with phones you could hear a start a moment before the record actually started.

Alan.
 
Print yes!
Just one more evil of the archaic system (but I know y'all love it!) and as tape formulations got ever "better" in terms of MOL and noise they tended to get worse for print. This did not matter too much for low dynamic range "pop" but was serious problem for programme with lots of silences in it like speech and drama.

The tape "pros" always stored tapes "tail out" because the act of rewinding them each time was said to reduce print through.

Note also that vinyl can suffer an effect called "pre echo" but that is a different mechanism entirely.

Glad I can now spend my days listening to music via the "zero defects" medium of digital!

Dave.
 
ecc83 said:
The tape "pros" always stored tapes "tail out" because the act of rewinding them each time was said to reduce print through.
Click to expand...

Storing tail out doesn't reduce print through. It merely shifts the phenomenon to the less objectionable post echo in place of the more audible pre-echo.

Cheers! :)
 
The Ghost of FM said:
Storing tail out doesn't reduce print through. It merely shifts the phenomenon to the less objectionable post echo in place of the more audible pre-echo.

Cheers! :)
Click to expand...

Not sure what you mean there? I always thought the idea was that "print" was a surface phenomenon and the act of rewinding cause an erasure of the weak, surface signal.

And by "zero defects" I mean of course no noise, distortion, drift, wow, flutter (and its attendant IMD) and BEST of all no changing bloody discs or flapping tape tails!
But I do understand that I am Old Nick his self in here!

Dave.
 
AFAIK....print through is mearly shifted, so you don't get the ghost notes before actual notes, rather it happens behind them, and is masked by the actual music.

Not sure if the act of rewinding has any effect on that...?

I belive most of the back coated tapes came into existance in an effort to reduce that phenomonon...along with better wind and less static build-up.

I think what you mean about "rewinding"...is that it is beneficial to occasionally FW/RW stored tapes so that they don't spend all their time in one same postion AFA the windings. It will shift them around a small amount, and that will help prevent strong printhrough in the same exact spot.
 
ecc83 said:
The tape "pros" always stored tapes "tail out" because the act of rewinding them each time was said to reduce print through.
Dave.
Click to expand...

Just to clarify this, the print through can happen during storage, the reason that you store the tape tail out is that the pre echo from the print through will happen after the start of the sound and you wont hear it, whereby if you store the tape tail in it happens before the sound starts.
Clear as mud?

Alan.
 
"... it is beneficial to occasionally FW/RW stored tapes ..."

While this was the case with later and better-maintained gear, if you go back to the late 60's early 70's, we were taught to ​not FF/RW before or during storage.

Tape tensioning was not as accurate as it was later, so a fast-forward or rewind resulted in a tighter tape pack, which led to more print-through. For day-to-day stuff around the radio stations we would just rewind, pull the head of the tape down beside the tape pack, and throw the reel in a box...no, I mean literally throw it into something like a big cardboard box. When we got ready to cut a commercial or whatever, we'd just grab a reel out of the "box 'o tape" and go.

Back in those days, engineering a 30 or 60 minute radio program was a complicated process, involving numerous small pieces of tape marked with china markers, Scotch taped to things like ceiling moldings and other places so they'd hang vertically. Needless to say, you did knock out a 30 or 60 minute program in a couple of days. At a couple of stations I worked at, the news reporters worked six days, but only reported five days...on the sixth day, they prepared various types of programs.

While it sounds morbid, back in those days, we had what were called "death reels", which were on-air obituaries that were made for noteworthy people when they got older, and were periodically updated. They might have 1 minute from this speech, 1 minute from that newscast, a couple of minutes from the local reporter, and so on. Needless to say, they involved a lot of strips of tape.

Point being, when the news guys finished creating or updating a "death reel" (and updates were done on the original work reel), someone would then dub the work reel to a fresh reel, the work reel would be stored in the news department, and the "fresh" reel would be stored so it could be readily accessed by the on-air DJ's.

And whoever did the dubbing would just let the fresh reel "run out", without fast-forwarding or rewinding, so the tape pack would stay loose.

Now aren't you glad I told you all of that...:D
 
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