Boy now THAT's something you shouldn't hang your hat on!

Shai -- how about a stroboscope wheel in the tape path? That's what I use, just to confirm things
are running on-speed. It's made by Dubbings Industries.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven Smolian" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 4:28 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Test tones circa 1978


> 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.
>