yewneek
Member
A few years back I was really into repairing and using cassettes. A bit of a tape tech if you will. Also, I would source old hifi, refurbish it and flip it for a little income. It was a distraction, and just about all of the tape stuff, tapes, walkmans, separates, all gone. I have one Walkman left I need to get working, WM-DD33 that was previously tuned up, but that's it.
There's a great forum/site called tapeheads.net I would frequent, it's pretty sef-explanatory. Interesting for archaic reasons, but it's pretty much exhausted on where it can go.
Anyway, in the scheme of things I got hold of a pretty decent 3-head tape deck, a Nakamichi BX300, and got it singing. It wasn't in bad shape when I got it, but belts and calibration followed soon after. I educated myself with some RTA software, re-educated myself on scienftific rigour in testing from university days, learned how to align, what Lissajous diagrams were, etc etc. I also got into old CD players by Philips, but that's another voyage to follow this week.
So, I got quite good, numbers were following the published specifications from back in the day, and I ventured into a portable Walkman too, the WM-D6C. Got a boxed copy of that in an auction, good condition lightly used by one amateur owner. It was also brought back up to spec relatively easily.
Long and the short, I had a collection of Walkmans, players, and generic Walkmans, and two good recording decks and some calibration stuff that was working, not all the super posh alignment gear, but it was pretty good, and repeatable results.
I had a load of tapes, found, donated, soured from owners, you know how you find old stuff locally if you look. I did. And I did. They've all gone now, save for some off metal tapes if in the attic.
I got down to running tape tests, White noise, sweep tones, comparisons of players, Walkmans, reocrdings, etc.
Attached are the results I generated on that journey. If anyone's interested, Frequency Response graphs mostly, I can supply the FLAC audio files separately on request, but it's an archive of maybe 100MB, so too big really for a post attachment.
Comments or critique welcome, but I'm back on the path of testing stuff again...more re-education coming...
GB
There's a great forum/site called tapeheads.net I would frequent, it's pretty sef-explanatory. Interesting for archaic reasons, but it's pretty much exhausted on where it can go.
Anyway, in the scheme of things I got hold of a pretty decent 3-head tape deck, a Nakamichi BX300, and got it singing. It wasn't in bad shape when I got it, but belts and calibration followed soon after. I educated myself with some RTA software, re-educated myself on scienftific rigour in testing from university days, learned how to align, what Lissajous diagrams were, etc etc. I also got into old CD players by Philips, but that's another voyage to follow this week.
So, I got quite good, numbers were following the published specifications from back in the day, and I ventured into a portable Walkman too, the WM-D6C. Got a boxed copy of that in an auction, good condition lightly used by one amateur owner. It was also brought back up to spec relatively easily.
Long and the short, I had a collection of Walkmans, players, and generic Walkmans, and two good recording decks and some calibration stuff that was working, not all the super posh alignment gear, but it was pretty good, and repeatable results.
I had a load of tapes, found, donated, soured from owners, you know how you find old stuff locally if you look. I did. And I did. They've all gone now, save for some off metal tapes if in the attic.
I got down to running tape tests, White noise, sweep tones, comparisons of players, Walkmans, reocrdings, etc.
Attached are the results I generated on that journey. If anyone's interested, Frequency Response graphs mostly, I can supply the FLAC audio files separately on request, but it's an archive of maybe 100MB, so too big really for a post attachment.
Comments or critique welcome, but I'm back on the path of testing stuff again...more re-education coming...
GB
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