There used to be a guy on eBay selling dubs of test tapes.

Steve Smolian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard L. Hess" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 3:41 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Test tones circa 1978


> Hi, Shai,
>
> You can trust the MRL flutter tapes, not the normal calibration tapes.
>
> I think Jay says that some place in the literature.
>
> There are better ways to calibrate speed involving long-term
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
> On 2011-01-28 3:11 PM, Shai Drori wrote:
>> If I can't trust an MRL test tape for speed accuracy then what options
>> do I have? This is a hot issue for me now since I need to calibrate
>> all machines for speed as well.
>> Shai
>>
>> On 27/01/2011 23:38, Richard L. Hess wrote:
>>> Hi, Jim,
>>>
>>> One thing that I used to do for quick testing was using a Sound
>>> Technology 1710A leave it punched on 20 Hz then just go up the scale
>>> 20-200-2000-20000 Hz, but that was more for testing than slate tones.
>>>
>>> I made a function generator that was nominally 10-100 per band but
>>> had a modification switch to go from 10-200 so I could sweep 1K-20K
>>> for recorder alignment without range switching.
>>>
>>> I would never trust "alignment" tones at the front of the tape for
>>> speed setting. In fact, you can't even trust an MRL calibration tape
>>> for that, other than the flutter test tapes, and that's not as
>>> accurate as you need for setting speed precisely on a recorder (which
>>> should be done with a large-diameter TAPE tachometer. This is a whole
>>> large issue, actually.
>>>
>>> Then, what Tom said, often times the tones were spliced on from a
>>> different session.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Richard
>>>
>>> On 2011-01-27 1:40 PM, Jim Sam wrote:
>>>> All,
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone know how much test tone generators varied circa 1978?
>>>>
>>>> I know not to expect digital accuracy. For example, I would not
>>>> expect a 10.00 kHz tone, but how much leeway was there? +/- 0.25kHz,
>>>> +/-0.5 kHz, +/-1.0 kHz, etc.?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Jim
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
> --
> Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
> Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
> http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
> Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.