steve williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Fred, while I can appreciate your "distaste" for audiophiles, my guess is that we/they are keeping a lot of technicians in business so you need to learn to work with us!
+1
Fred, while I can appreciate your "distaste" for audiophiles, my guess is that we/they are keeping a lot of technicians in business so you need to learn to work with us!
Fred, while I can appreciate your "distaste" for audiophiles, my guess is that we/they are keeping a lot of technicians in business so you need to learn to work with us!
IMHO it goes the other way - audiophiles can learn a lot from Fred Thal, considered by any one in the business as being one of top experts in Studer A80 and A820 matters (another one is Andreas Kuhn). IMHO he is not addressing audiophile preferences in his posts, but mostly performance.
just to clearify:
isn´t the azimuth adjustment the head alignment in the vertical plane vs the tape travel?
so if azimuth is adjusted on a machine, it shouldn´t be necessary to adjust each time you want to play a different tape?
or am I off the track completely?
best
Leif
After we placed a battery power to the repro amp of A80 to replace the stock voltage regulated power supply and found improvement but in the first try same to record amp was disappointed , there was some radio broadcasting mixed into the recording too, we found long wire and bad routing caused problem and after shorter the wire and direct to the board then problem has gone, even A80 is so sensitive to the RF and I don't know what will happen to A810 and A820
I think most of us audiophile, low techie, tape lovers have this expectation that if we purchase the right tapes that use the proper tape stock and are dubbed with the right EQ/bias (all that techie stuff) that we can listen blissfully without trying to delve into things we are not qualified to delve into.
we want plug and play. and then the questions become what is the upside to higher levels of fine tuning the tape path and EQ? as opposed to the downsides of messing up what might be 'good enough' settings all around to begin with? and then we have made all our tapes worse.
in a perfect world we might all have Fred or someone like him to train us or live next door. but we have to live in our world. is compromise a reasonable choice? and no doubt it might not be.
I actually record at +4 db which is 396 nW/m not +9 as stated here...A reasonable compromise for those of us that don't have Fred next door is to have someone of Fred's caliber do a complete mechanical and electrical alignment of the deck, refurbishing as necessary, with azimuth set via an MRL test tape. Then you plug it in, sit back and enjoy your tapes.
In theory, every tape you play should have a set of test tones at the beginning for setting calibrated repro level and azimuth. You'd use the level tone to calibrate the repro level and the azimuth tone to calibrate repro azimuth. (Doing both of these things, by the way, is no harder than aligning a tonearm/cartridge for best LP playback; it does require a couple of tools - in my case, I use a Mac laptop with oscilloscope software to view a lissajous pattern for azimuth alignment. For repro level, I use the deck's own VU meters). But none of the tapes I own have such tones (I don't own any of Ed Pong's tapes (yet); my understanding is that his tapes have a 1K test tone at the beginning for adjusting repro level, since he records at +9 levels. Not sure if he has an azimuth tone). True master tapes do - the recording engineers record them as a matter of course before starting the main recording session so that a reproducer playing the master can be precisely aligned for that particular master tape. But I don't own any true master tapes; what I own are master tape dubs, some dubbed directly from the master, some from a mixdown master or a safety master. So everything I have is either second or third generation, not a true master tape. What I rely on is the fact that my tape sources align their machines with MRL test tapes; therefore, if my machine has its azimuth set properly using an MRL tape, it should be good to go. There may be minute variations, but I'm simply not going to obsess over that, and without test tones I can't do anything about it anyway.
If your machine has been properly aligned by a good tech using an MRL test tape, don't obsess and just enjoy the fantastic sound quality!
John C.
I actually record at +4 db which is 396 nW/m not +9 as stated here...
Ed
Hi Ed. Sorry - hit the wrong number key! I was thinking RMG 900 tape, and typed the 9. Original post corrected.
John C.