[BC] Cassette deck maintenance

[Jason R. at KGVL - KIKT]

What happens when you try to play a tape created on somebody ELSE's 
recorder.  Or they play one of yours...

  Gotta start somewhere...

  I *still* have one of those old reels, and one of those old carts, that 
you had to buy years ago with the stuff on there to calibrate TO so you'd be 
at the same speed as everybody else... I used them to make my own cassettes.
I'd compare them to some other commerciall produced product, like music, or 
speech, or whatnot.  1k is 1k, whatever tape I got it from...

I would do it when a machine was first purchased, to see how far off the mfg 
standards allowed things to drift, and get it set to the same speed as all 
the other machines in house. Or as close as was practical.  We are talking 
about cassettes, and some of the machines we're really built for much 
twiddling.

  Set the play speed first is how I did it, with a known standard of some 
sort, built from more than one source. Then, if the machine had a record 
speed pot, use that to be sure it recorded at the same IPS as the playback.

  Wayyy too much piddling for something as junky as a cassette deck, but, 
you can get all the machines in one facility awfully close to one another, 
and hear when one starts to have the band/s strectch...

  Hearing the drift on these when playing back a commercially produced music 
tape didn't happen.

  Hearing some vox tape that was 120min each side DID create problems.  Way 
too thin, and heavy, for a weak machine to pull.  Wears out a new set of 
bands in only a handful of plays.

 I eventually told clients who insisted on sending their weekend programs on 
2hr cassettes I would not accept anything longer than 45 minutes per side, 
and why.

Jason

> If the tape is played back AT THE SAME TAPE SPEED THAT WAS USED TO RECORD 
> THE TONE, the frequency of the played back tone will STILL be the same as 
> the audio oscillator tone frequency that was recorded.
>
> --
> Jerry Mathis