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Gregorio, This is why I'm such a fanatic about developing tapes and looking at them. The fact that track 3 has B NOT backwards confuses me. Also, I'm surprised you are writing 1/3/2/4 because visually on the tape you'd see 1/2/3/4 and that helps understanding. You could use 1 + 4 to capture, but I'd rather fully understand why as the narrow tracks, especially at the edge, are not the most desirable unless that's all you have. With track 3 B NOT backwards, I'm at a loss to explain. http://richardhess.com/notes/category/audio/magnetic-tape-developing/ Develop the tape and post a photo and link to it from the reply message to the list. Do not rule out misaligned heads. Also, some machines used 1/2 and 4/3 as stereo recording and they might have been UK machines instead of the more common US practice of 1/3 4/2 (in all instances L/R and SideA SideB). Cheers, Richard On 2012-02-27 5:39 AM, Gregorio Garcia Karman wrote: > Dear List, > > looking forward to the beginning of a new digitization week: everything is going well in Cambridge thanks in great extent to the support of the members of the list. Huge thanks! > > Now, I have a small group of 1/4 inch tapes in the collection on which I am working (ca 1950s-70s, recorded mainly on Ferrographs) which seems to have a track format, which I haven't met before. On those tapes standard half-track and half-track butterfly Studer blocks consistently produce a dual mono signal with unacceptable crosstalk on both channels (bleeding of about -20 dB referring to the signal on the other channel). > > On the other hand, the output of a quarter-track headblock is as follows: > > track 1: Signal A > track 3: Signal A + B > track 2: Signal A + B backwards > track 4: Signal B backwards > > It would seem that this very small group of tapes would have been recorded on a machine with a very narrow guard-band in comparison to the rest of the tapes I have. What is your opinion about transferring those tapes on a quarter track headblock and keeping tracks 1 and 4? > > I would also be curious about which machine could have had a track format that would agree with the former observations. > > Thanks for your comments! > > Gregorio Garcia Karman > [log in to unmask] > -- 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.