Hi, Corey,

Ah yes, the Firesign Theatre tape that appeared to have been made with 
part two overwriting part one (but going in the other direction, I 
think). It was two track stereo. I suspected that this was the reason 
and I realize it was used to reduce erase noise. If the erase head had 
not been disabled, they would have lost one half hour segment instead of 
two--although there was a tantalizing hint to what be there, we could 
not find even a sliver to recover without the other program.

Later designs with higher erase frequencies and especially lower 
waveform distortion did not need to do this. There was no longer a benefit.

Cheers,

Richard



On 2/8/2016 12:39 AM, Corey Bailey wrote:
> Other "out of the box" thinking at the time led to disabling the erase
> head for first-pass on virgin tape to help the signal-to-noise ratio.
> This was accomplished by switching the erase voltage to a dummy head so
> that the load remained the same on the erase amp. Even tried this with
> 2" multitrack recording with improved S/N results but then, the mixer
> du-jour would forget to turn on the erase head when needed and record
> sound-on-sound for a punch-in so, the multitrack innovation was abandoned.
-- 
Richard L. Hess                   email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada                             647 479 2800
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.