These particles will stay in the same arrangement unless they are exposed to a new magnetic field — so a tape can be played back many times, until it wears out! The remaining head is the erase head 4. The capstan, rollers and arms all help to keep the tape stretched out as it passes through the heads, so that it moves at the same speed and gets a good-quality recording.
Cassette tapes were developed by the company Philips in Although recording to tape had been possible since the s , the technology was large, awkward and expensive. The Philips Compact Cassette was cheap, portable small enough to carry around and could be used at home or in the office, with basic recording equipment.
But when Masaru Ibuka, the co-founder of the Japanese company Sony, wanted a way to listen to his favourite music on long flights, he sparked an invention that would change the way we listened to music forever: the Sony Walkman.
The Walkman was released in and brought music into every part of our lives. Not just our homes, or cars — but anywhere at any time! It is more or less a portable cassette player that connects with headphones. We can do everything on our phones! Aligning for the max high-frequency response yields a lot of unwanted distortion. These C-shaped metal pieces determine what happens to the magnetic particles in the tape. The erase and repro reproducing heads are self-explanatory in their functions.
Each tape head has a narrow gap which the tape goes past. When recording or erasing, the erase and record heads each have a coil of wire wrapped around a metal core. Current is run through the wire, generating a magnetic field at the gap. When monitoring from the sync or repro head during playback, the gap detects a moving magnetic field, generating a current in the wire.
They point in random directions since they are unmagnetized. The erase head does exactly as the name implies. Some cheaper tape machines use a permanent magnet instead to erase the incoming tape while recording.
A current both the recorded audio and the AC bias is fed through its coil of wire. Louder audio means more current is sent to the record head, resulting in a stronger magnetic field at the gap and more magnetization of the tape particles.
That is until the magnetic field induced onto the tape is so high that the tape reaches saturation unable to become further magnetized. Tape with prior-recorded audio aligned magnetic particles , has magnetic flux. We need a selection to control where in the signal flow to monitor back from. Usually, there are three points in the signal flow. Choosing the input option monitors the audio at the input point- the signal before it reaches the record head, listening to the audio before it reaches the tape.
Simple enough so far…. What is heard depends on the record status safe or armed and whether the tape machine is playing, stopped, or recording.
If record is armed but playback is stopped, the audio heard is actually the same signal as if in input mode. But if record is armed and the tape is playing, the audio heard is the playback audio picked up by the sync head. And if recording, record safe channels monitor playback audio via the sync head and record ready channels monitor at the input point.
This is why there is a separate repro head — it allows one to monitor what has been recorded to tape instead of the audio entering the machine at the input point. This is especially helpful while laying down initial tracks.
Repro monitoring is designed exclusively for playback. The repro and record heads have different physical and electronic properties which affect the sound quality of the playback. The record head is optimized and designed for recording, not playback. It also has a limited response to lessen the crosstalk between channels when overdubbing.
If in record ready and stopped, the signal is monitored at the input point. There are switches to select these three modes for each individual channel. There are also master selection switches that override the individual channel selections to choose the monitoring for all channels simultaneously. This rectangular aluminum or steel block, usually mounted over the tape heads, is in the shape of one concave groove that holds the tape in place.
Some studios made a policy of sticking to one brand of tape, but it was not uncommon for variations to occur even within different batches of the same brand of tape. Tape speed is another major factor. Faster tape speeds tend to deliver cleaner sound quality, since the signal is spread over a larger area and the signal-to-noise ratio is increased. The most commonly used speeds with two-inch tape are 15 and 30 IPS inches per second.
Indeed, in the modern era, when tape is most often being used for its sonic effect, slower speeds prevail. Although owning a classic two-inch Studer or Ampex tape machine certainly earns bragging rights, in today's DAW-oriented world, the fact is that fewer of us would opt to record to analog tape, even if we could.
Space considerations, cost considerations, and the scarcity of tape and parts are only the beginning. The fact is, tape's destructive editing can be a slow and tedious process in a world where time is truly money. And even the medium itself is no longer cost effective. Fortunately there are a number of great sounding plug-in processors for your DAW that can bring some of that analog tape warmth and "glue" to your tracks.
For example, Universal Audio's wildly popular Studer A Multichannel Tape Recorder is a stunningly faithful emulation of the original machine's sound, having been painstakingly developed over a one year period with input from the original manufacturer.
In fact, the sonic differences between the A plug-in and the original A hardware are so minute, that many of the world's top engineers opt to use the plug-in for their day-to-day work.
Aside from the obvious convenience factor, one of the biggest advantages of tape emulation plug-ins is their flexibility. You can choose to process only certain tracks, rather than the whole mix — imparting the warmth, low-end bump, and cohesive properties of tape to the drums and bass tracks, for example, without adding any tape color to guitars and vocals.
Or you can add just a hint of tape compression to the mix, without oversaturating things the way an actual two-track machine might. Regardless of how you choose to implement it, the sound of analog tape can be a great addition to your digital mix. Or, you may find the Studer A is just the thing to add a bit of understated warmth and low-end punch to your mix. Tape lives on.
Analog Tape Recording Basics. A Bit of History Analog recording, of course, predates tape — with everything from wax cylinders to wire being used to capture a performance.
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