Swirly sound on old tapes

P

Ptron

New member
I'm having a dandy ol' time putting a bunch of old tapes onto my computer. These tapes suffer from muddines, noise, bad mixing, dropouts, and most annoying of all, that obnoxious high end swirling sound, most prevalent on cymbals. Where does that come from anyway?
I'm interested in any tips, tricks, or articles on dealing with old analog that's in bad shape. Know any? Man, I sure wish I had kept track of all the original multi-tracks. Oh, well.
 
Yo Ptron: [spelled backwards is: NORTP!!

I don't think you can do much with your tapes. They, like most tapes, have probably stretched, hence the swirrling noise.

You might try to speed up the tape a bit if you have a box that will do that. Or record the tape into a recorder that allows you to adjust the pitch, then raise the pitch and see what happens when you re-record.

That's about all I can think of unless you have big bucks to go to the FBI where they can reconstruct the tape with gear that costs way more than my budget.

Green Hornet

[This message has been edited by The Green Hornet (edited 05-11-2000).]
 
Yeah, I'm speeding up the tapes. It does help. Makes things sound better for probably a few different reasons.
 
Ptron,

You may want to try your tapes in another player in order to record them into your computer. This is why I HATE cassette tape so much. A tape in one player may sound great but in another sounds like it's playing underwater! Experiment with several players if you have access to them (I'd even try a Walkman style player just to see how it sounded).

I think the problem I have had with cassette tape has come down to tape head alignment, called azimuth, with is the alignment of the tape deck's play head relative to the movement of the tape. Some higher-end decks have adjustable azimuth to correct for tapes that would otherwise play back poorly. I have found a trick is to manually fiddle with the tape alignment on my tape deck to get the best sound. Here's how I do it but remember that your results may be different.

The cover for the tape door cover on my deck is removable, presumably to get down to the tape heads for cleaning. I remove the door cover (mine slides up and off with the tape mechanism open) but be careful not break anything. Once the cover is off, put in your tape, close the door and start playing the tape. While listening to the tape, try pressing hard enough on the right side of the tape to cause it to move. Did you notice any difference in fidelity of the tape? Make a note of any changes and now press on the left side of the tape. Note any changes from this. You can try to pull one side toward you instead of pushing it. Experiment with this until you get the best sound. If the amount of recorded material is small enough, you may be able to manually hold the tape in the right position while recording it into your PC. If this is not feasable, I would try wedging a folded piece of paper behind or in front of the tape to keep it in the best sounding position. You CAN do this in a limited fashon without removing the tape door cover but it is more difficult to keep the tape in the optimum position. Obviously this is a short term rigged-up solution but if you are only going to do this once (once the music is in the PC, put the tape in storage!) the quality difference you can achieve will be worth your effort.

I know this post is a bit long winded but I wanted to fully explain myself.

sb
 
SpamBurglar said:
Ptron,

You may want to try your tapes in another player in order to record them into your computer. This is why I HATE cassette tape so much. A tape in one player may sound great but in another sounds like it's playing underwater!

sb
Click to expand...
What about checking the NR settings? Don't forget step one!
 
I'm in the same boat you are - I have a bunch of old cassette tapes to transfer at some point...

This idea of azimuth and phasing that people are mentioning sounds like a good thin to persue. Some restoration tools have electronic azimuth which adjusts a small delay between the stereo tracks - kind of like the thing you watch when you look at your stereo field during mastering anyway. The electronic azimuth adjustments would adjust one track +/- 20 ms or so relative to the other. The fine post by SpamBurglar mentions doing this physically - I've done it that way myself to rescue an old recording and it works nicely, expecially if you can find a way to wedge the tape in that exact spot so you don't have to hold it for 45 minutes.

I guess if you had a bunch of tapes to do it might be good to find a good sounding cassette 4 track and transcribe the tapes at 3 3/4 (I think that's the speed) at 96KHz then adjust the sample rate to the correct speed - audio programs like Diamond Cut and Magix Audio Cleaning Lab will do this for you. I might try this myself now that I'm thinking of it - it might sound a lot better...
 
DigitalSmigital said:
What about checking the NR settings? Don't forget step one!
Click to expand...
Oh yeah - hope it's not Dolby C...that's a tricky dynamic NR and I'm wondering how well it translates between machines :(

If it's A or B I usually skip it and just EQ to taste. Magix has a Dolby B EQ curve but I use to Daddy of all NR for restoration - IMO Voxengo Redunoise ...
 
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