Holy crap! I love tape!!! 15ips RULES!

[the brill bedroom]

Surely we can all agree that one should use whatever tools one has to record the music at hand, taht's the whole deal. really. That said, it has been years since I've had as satisfying a recording experience as the stuff I recorded with Roger a few weeks ago. We tracked "keeper" acoustic and drums (using a simple 3 mic drum setup) onto my Otari 8 track at 15 IPS- sounds killer. Overdubbed Hofner bass and it's halfway there. We're certainly not breaking any new ground but the bottom line is that the music sounds righteous coming back off that tape.

[johnny7]

Yeah, I just finished slapping an old 8 track head stack into a blackface adat, converting to analog (and making use of the vhs transport).
It took a little work, but we got her to run at 22 1/2 ips - the perfect compromise between 15 and 30. It sounds dope.

[Nathan Eldred]

Tape is the new Digital!

[lsn110]

Yeah, I just finished slapping an old 8 track head stack into a blackface adat, converting to analog (and making use of the vhs transport).
It took a little work, but we got her to run at 22 1/2 ips - the perfect compromise between 15 and 30. It sounds dope.

Holy crap! This sounds like the holy grail to me. A smallish rack mountable 1/2" 8-track. Any details that you could post on how you did this would be greatly appreciated. This would also make a great Tape Op article I think.

Paul

[mertmo]

YEAH YEAH YEAH!

Show me how to convert my blackface adats into analog decks and I will freak out and do dances in your honor!

seriously that's the greatest idea i've heard in a long time!

[xonlocust]

Yeah, I just finished slapping an old 8 track head stack into a blackface adat, converting to analog (and making use of the vhs transport).
It took a little work, but we got her to run at 22 1/2 ips - the perfect compromise between 15 and 30. It sounds dope.

Holy crap! This sounds like the holy grail to me. A smallish rack mountable 1/2" 8-track. Any details that you could post on how you did this would be greatly appreciated. This would also make a great Tape Op article I think.

Paul

yeah - this is a joke right? i honestly don't see how that's possible at all... where are the emoticons when you need them?

[lsn110]

yeah - this is a joke right? i honestly don't see how that's possible at all... where are the emoticons when you need them?

OK...now that I re-read it it does sound fishy...Still it's a cool idea.

How fast does an ADAT run anyhow...

[MattGrabe]

Someone else mentioned it, and yes, VHS tape is a linear digital device. However, I believe it still uses a magnetic system rather then optics like a digital hard drive. But then again, who cares, if it sounds good, then it sounds good!

As far as 15 ips vs. 30 ips. I don't think there is any actual low end boost going on with a 15 ips machine. When printing the performance to tape, the higher frequencies are reproduced better on the 30ips machine due to the amount of real estate on the tape a wave takes up. So your getting more of a smooth tone on the high end, allowing the low end to be more present. Some would say that the absence of the high end takes away from the space and depth of a recording. Then again, I have yet to A/B a 15/30 session ... screw it, back to what I said before, if it sounds good, then it sounds good. Keep those machines rolling at 15.

Also, if someone knows that whole topic better, please respond, I could be very wrong.

[rdc]

Every VCR tape has 2 audio tracks. A crappy linear one that runs along the edge of the tape (.35mm/channel like 1 ips). The "HiFi" audio track is the one that most modern VCRs use. It is NOT digital audio. It does have something in common with digital audio tapes but only in how it is recorded....they both use a "helical scan" technique meaning that the heads are mounted diagonally to the tape and spin thus putting narrow tracks diagonally across the tape. The audio and video both use almost the entire tape but are recorded at different depths.

So its hard to compare the width and speed of the tape with reel to reel tape because its the width of the individual track that you want. One of these sites specs a write speed of 4.83 m/second for video. If the audio heads spin as fast as the video heads that thats a lot of tape

http://www.mastersonaudio.com/tips/20020615.htm
http://macbase.cg.nu/vcr.htm
http://zeus.eed.usv.ro/misc/mirrors/cc/vcr.htm

edit: Should have kept looking...so the audio on VHS sucks, the audio on HiFi VHS uses helical scan but is analog, the audio on S-VHS IS digital...so I guess you could say that VHS tapes use digital audio...sometimes

[xonlocust]

As far as 15 ips vs. 30 ips. I don't think there is any actual low end boost going on with a 15 ips machine. When printing the performance to tape, the higher frequencies are reproduced better on the 30ips machine due to the amount of real estate on the tape a wave takes up. So your getting more of a smooth tone on the high end, allowing the low end to be more present. Some would say that the absence of the high end takes away from the space and depth of a recording. Then again, I have yet to A/B a 15/30 session ... screw it, back to what I said before, if it sounds good, then it sounds good. Keep those machines rolling at 15.

Also, if someone knows that whole topic better, please respond, I could be very wrong.

there is in fact a low end boost on tape machines which is a function of the tape head bump. the frequency & amplitude of where this appears is dependent on the machine and tape speed. you can see tape machines are not 100% linear and flat, which is why you monitor what's coming OFF the machine, and not what the console is hearing - as they are usually pretty different. this is explained in better detail here:

http://www.endino.com/graphs/

you can also pretty clearly see this what you align a machine and then do a sweep from 50hz to 10k - it's a little roller coaster ride.