DIY cassette duplication.. Muffled copies? Help!

[drybasement]

I've enjoyed reading these forums for a long time.. I've never had a question that seemed pressing enough to post until now, so maybe you all can help.

I've been messing around making cassettes of bands, mostly ones I've recorded, for a while now, and I finally got sick of dubbing them one by one on a small double tape deck I bought for $5 at a yard sale. So I just picked up a Tascam T-3000 Cassette Duplicator on ebay, it looks beautiful and like it has barely ever been used, but the copies it makes sound considerably worse than the master cassette! Anyone have any suggestions or did I just blow $200!?

So I've made way too many copies on my little tape deck, but they always sound almost identical to the master cassette (although it takes FOREVER). The copies I have made on the T-3000 sound muffled and lack the high end clarity of the master, to the point that I wouldn't want to use them. It isn't terrible, but it sounds like you've rolled the treble off a fair amount (I could post a clip but it is pretty easy to imagine). I thought maybe it was just dirty but I cleaned the heads/pinch roller and it still sounded the same. The manual says that if the master is too loud the copies will have distortion (which it didn't sound like) but my master was pretty loud (not crazy though) so I tried a different master cassette with a more moderate volume and the copies still sound muffled and the highs are rolled off..

Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with this?? My tapes have gotta pop!

Here is a link to the darn thing on ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 500wt_1156

Some related questions I also have.. I recently got a first tape machine (a Tascam 58) off of this board and it is wonderful! I don't have a demagnetizer yet thought, and the few people in town I know who have experience with this type of stuff said it isn't a big deal, as long as I clean it every time it won't matter. Are they crazy? It is in great shape and sounds fine, and I don't use it a ton, just once every week or so as I am still recording digitally mainly. Do I need to shell out the $80 for a Han-D-Mag or something or can I wait a while?

Also.. I've been cleaning/demagnetizing my various cassette players with one of those little cassette tape cleaners/demagnetizers. If I we're to get a han-d-mag would it be better to do it with that and clean them with swabs/alcohol like I clean my 58, or is that too much? Am I correct to think I should not use the cassette cleaner/demag in the T-3000?

Sorry for all the silly cassette questions.. I'm just new to this and trying to get/keep everything sounding good.

Thanks!
David

[calaverasgrandes]

well a couple things. Last time I checked out cassette dupers (and it was a while ago) IIRC none of the afforable dupers had very reasonable frequency response. I think its a byproduct of the higher tape speed that they lose some hi freqs.
Also, see about aligning them heads. If the azimuth isnt right they wont play back right. Can you play back on the duper? sometimes a cassette will sound fine on the wacked ass azimuth of the source machine but sound like garbage elsewhere.

[Marc Alan Goodman]

Yep. If it's in high speed mode it's prob gonna sound like crap. Azimuth is worth checking. The cleaner cassette should be doing an acceptable job for a cassette machine, however if the thing was in use for twenty years you may want to get in there with some q tips and head cleaner and get the gunk out.

Who even has a cassette player to listen to them on anymore? That's one format I was happy to see go the way of the dodo.

[ThePaloverdeBeetle]

Here's a link to the technical documentation on the Tascam.

http://www.tascam.com/content/downloads ... ECHDOC.pdf

Freq response rated +-3db from 50hz to 10khz. That basically means its going to fall off after 10k. It was meant for voice duplication basically not music. You're never going to get any more out of it.

Back in the day with expensive equipment (Electrosound/Lyrec open reel duplicators) we used to dupe high quality music cassettes at 80 time real time speed no problem but the equipment has to be designed to do it. The Tascam looks like it was made for spoken word.

[Gregg Juke]

I still have a cassette player, because I have lots of cassettes! I don't have the time or the willpower to archive them in digital format. It takes long enough to rip my CD tunes into iTunes, to load into my iPod.

But it's been a _long_ time since someone _asked_ me for a cassette. In fact, a couple of years ago, when I didn't have a viable CD burner, I asked my band if I could give them cassettes of some new tunes and demos to work on. One of the guys (my not-yet-ready-for-Vegas funnyboy drummer) said-- "Why not give them to us on punch-cards?" That was the oldest data storage medium he could think of; he's not an audio guy, so he didn't say "paper-tape/wire-recordings/wax cylinders," etc. etc., but I got his little joke nonetheless.

After beating him to a pulp (maybe I only dreamed that part), I never mentioned cassettes in their presence again.

GJ

[trodden]

cassettes are back. I've had a handful of friends put out a cassette this year.

[Brett Siler]

Last resort might be some sort of Harmonic Exciter. One of the few things a BBE Sonic Maximizer maybe useful for, (not hating I have one just only so much it's good for).

[drybasement]

Wooo thanks for all the responses, and especially for that tech document.

It makes sense knowing that it was only intended for voice and other basic stuff. That is totally what it sounds like, a pretty decent roll-off of everything around 10k and above. I didn't want to give up on it yet so I tried an experiment of making a new master with a hi-shelf boost at 8k and it sounded a lot closer to what it was originally supposed to, but there is still sometimes this problem of the left channel being about 6db lower than the right channel on all the copies.. how do I go about checking the azimuth on one of these things or aligning the heads?

Oh, and no you cannot play back on it, it only copies and rewinds.

Yeah I know cassette may seem like kind of a silly format.. but it is cheap, fun, and kinda sounds awesome. I've picked up some pretty nice cassette decks for pretty much nothing, and it is way more fun to make tapes from vinyl than it is to make cd-rs from mp3s. And I see the worth in releasing something on a tape too.. if you want to do a very limited run of something, it is an affordable and fun way to do a physical, analog release without the cost and time required to do vinyl. Obviously making thousands of copies is probably out of the question.. but a lot of the music I like sees only very limited physical releases, and if I can't have vinyl I would rather have a tape of something than only be able to get an mp3. CD's seem like kind of a waste to me, the packaging and listening experience isn't really any more enjoyable than just using a computer. Cassettes are definitely not a mainstream/largescale thing, but that is the point and part of the beauty/fun of it.

[evan]

If all else fails, you can always use a professional duplication company like National Audio Company. They're very affordable and can do short runs, various colors and tape types, on-tape labelling, etc.

There are quite a few tape labels here in Olympia...and a lot of broken tape dupers. I like tapes, but I think much more than CDs they definitely benefit from proper mastering and a professional level of care.

[trodden]

If all else fails, you can always use a professional duplication company like National Audio Company. They're very affordable and can do short runs, various colors and tape types, on-tape labelling, etc.

There are quite a few tape labels here in Olympia...and a lot of broken tape dupers. I like tapes, but I think much more than CDs they definitely benefit from proper mastering and a professional level of care.

Yeah National Audio Company seems to be the main choice lately.

[apropos of nothing]

Relatedly, Sony has recently discontinued the cassette Walkman product line, as so drolly noted by the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11618899

I knew despite misgivings that the cassette's day of retro-chic would come. Physical transport mechanisms -- bah!

[ThePaloverdeBeetle]

Performing an azimuth alignment on a machine like that with no playback head would be pretty close to impossible. You'd have to make recording of high freq tones (at around -20db). Play it back on a known good cassette deck, check the azimuth and then estimate the azimuth adjustment on the record machine's record head, rinse repeat until you go mad. A known good playback machine would be one that's alignment had been checked with a professional cassette calibration tape (If there is such a thing anymore!). Additionally, the plastic shells that house the cassette tape usually introduce moderate to severe azimuth errors. Essentially, you probably do not really want to go there.
Since you are having a problem with a severe difference in volume between channels my first instinct would be that you could be using the wrong type of tape for the deck and improper bias alignment is giving you trouble. In other words ferric bias setup for chrome tape or vice versa might cause that type of problem. My second guess would be that the head is severely worn or that there is track misalignment. Generally speaking azimuth misalignment would not cause a huge overall level difference between channels, it would cause loss of high frequencies and phasing issues.

You really can't get very far with this type of thing without probably a service manual and a significant time investment.