[geeks] bizarre stuff available

[Lionel Peterson]

--- Joshua D Boyd <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu> wrote:

> A local radio station uses a cheap HiFi VCR for their long play
> programs that get recorded earlier for over night or sunday morning
> broadcast. Makes sense.  In theory a decent HiFi VCR should be very
> good for audio, what with the width of the tape, and isn't it a
> pretty fast tape speed also? 

Hi-Fi VHS decks do not use the heilical scan head, they stripe the
audio tracks on the edges of the tape (use seperate heads). The speed
of the tape is not that fast (appears to be about the speed of a
cassette, but that is just an impression) - the video head (the big
round spinning head in the middle of the tape slot), since it spins
around and records on a diagonal, exploits the width of the tape to
increase the spped of the head over the tape.

Actual consumer DAT tape decks aren't that expensive any more, but
still an order of magnitude greater than a commodity VHS Hi-Fi VCR.

I am bothered by the thought of the sound going from analog (source) to
digital (CD) to analog (analog out) to digital (MP3) to analog
(playback device). Shove some digital effects, mix in an analog mixing
board and a digital recorder, and it becomes a bit insane. I *love*
so-called DDD CDs (analog -> Digital mixer, deck, -> digital CD ->
analog on playback device - all intermediate steps are done in digital
domain).

Of course, having said that, I have about 75% of my CD collection
"ripped", for ease of use at the office... ;^)

Well, there is the concept of Good Enough.

=====
Lionel

"Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten
programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software"
Bill Gates, in "An OpenLetter to Hobbyists" dated February 3, 1976
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