Tape Guide (Q and A) (Aug. 1970)

Splicing

Q. I have read that a reel of tape that has been spliced is not considered a permanent link due to eventual drying-out. It was suggested that the spliced reel be duplicated on a fresh, continuous reel for permanent storage and use. Is this true? Many of my recordings are spliced because of editing, etc.

-John Eshia, New Britain, Conn.

A. Of course it is preferable that a reel of recorded tape have no splices in it. On the other hand, using high quality splicing tape, the splice is apt to last many years if correctly made. The question really boils down to how fussy one is. Occasionally one of my splices made years ago (perhaps when I was less expert at making a splice or when splicing tape was not as good as today) does come apart. But I have not found the inconvenience so great or frequent as to warrant re-recording all the reels containing a splice. Moreover, you have to balance the inconvenience of a splice coming apart against the deterioration in signal-to-noise ratio--about 3 dB--when making a copy of the reel in question.

More Volume

Q. My tape recorder cannot make recordings with sufficient volume.

Prerecorded tapes play back with all the volume I need. But I cannot get satisfactory results on home recordings. Recording either from a phonograph record or from FM, I cannot get the needles on the VU meters to deflect sufficiently, no matter how far up the volume controls of the tuner and the tape recorder are turned.

Could this be a problem in impedance matching. My tuner is part of a General Electric phonograph Model *

-Ernest J. Oresik, Madison, Indiana.

A. I doubt that yours is an impedance matching problem. It appears to be one of insufficient signal fed into the tape recorder, or else something faulty in the record amplifier of your tape machine. Can you borrow a tuner from a friend and see if you then drive your tape recorder adequately? If your friend's tuner drives your tape machine to full recording level, as shown by the VU meter, it is unlikely that the trouble is in your tape machine.

If the fault is in your GE unit, perhaps you can get more signal by picking it up at a later stage of amplification. If this isn't feasible, you can buy an inexpensive preamplifier in most audio stores, and this may solve your problem. Such preamps are customarily sold for accepting the signal from a tape playback head or from magnetic phono cartridges; and they provide the necessary extra amplification and the required equalization.

Some of these preamps also have a flat position (no equalization), and this is the type you want. Presumably the signal you are feeding out of your GE unit is already equalized and therefore the flat position of the pre amp should be used.

Frequency Response Measurements

Q. I am rather mystified by a statement in an AUDIO PROFILE. It stated that a tape recorder's overall performance (record playback) was ±2.5 dB from 20 to 20,000 Hz. The playback response of this machine was measured by the reviewer as being ±2.5 dB from 50 to 15,000 Hz.

Assuming that these figures are correct, why would the playback response be inferior to the overall record-playback response?

(Robert Pearson, Chicago, Illinois )

A. The reason for rating playback response only between 50 and 15,000 Hz is that this is the compass of the test tapes in accepted use. Further, it is possible for a machine to have better record playback response than playback response alone if the machine contains equalization in the record amplifier to make up for deficiencies in the playback process (deficiencies in the head, playback amplifier, and so on.)

(Audio magazine, Aug. 1970; Herman Burstein)

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