Help Digitizing Cassettes (Phase Reveresed)

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2008 5:05 am

You only need to phase-reverse one channel. If you phase-reversed both, you would be back where you started (at least audibly).

Either the cassette deck used for the recording or your replay deck deck is not correctly calibrated. I would simply bring the level up on your weaker channel during post-processing.

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2008 6:14 am

Grab some headphones, and bring up the level of the lower one until the sound is exactly in the middle of your forehead. Listen for the bass, that's often in the dead centre, and the kick, and the lead vocals are almost always going to be dead centre.

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2008 7:37 am

westy wrote:

sorry to bring this thread up but I am just in the process of ripping that particular out of phase cassette. I am using balanced outputs into balanced inputs of My ADC with only one cable phase reversed, when sumed to mono its a huge difference but it still seems to lack volume on one channel
heres a photo of the wave form as you can see one of the channels is smaller

I stupidly only bought one phase inverter on my order from thoman, do you think using another one will increase the volume in the other channel?
any help welcome thanks guys

To the bold question....No. Another inverter will put them both back into out of phase, just reversed from the original. And then you'll be right back where you started, only poorer and with more stuff gunking things up in the path.

If you remove the device with the inverter, and record that song again without having ever touched any level controls on anything, are the levels equal, or are they still different? Is it the intermediate device in that one channel? Is it a level adjustment in your computer input? Is the tape itself recorded imbalanced? Is the TASCAM outputting one side lower than the other, for some reason? We don't know.

Personally, I would have just done an easy flip in a software program, saved some money, and called it done, if it worked. Any time you add a device into the signal chain, there is a chance of detrimental results. There's also a chance for mischief with messing with a digitally-recorded signal, but I would have tried first.

Is it possible to try the BIAS and level procedures mentioned in the manual, to make sure the tape is playing back properly? Is there extra tape without signal on any of those tapes that you could use? Are all the tapes the same brand and type?

BTW, if you will be doing any software noise reduction (or any other processing, however minor), and all the songs on a particular tape sound like they were "finished" about the same, you may want to just get everything set properly, record the entire side(s) of each tape, and apply any processing to the whole thing at once. You may want the tape hiss between tunes to sample to tell a program what noise to remove, depending on what program you will use for noise removal, if any. Then you can separate and trim the songs. IF the songs sound pretty much finished and uniform, this will save time and make it more likely that all the tunes have been processed alike, which may help keep everything more the same.

You may have to process each different tape separately, though.

Just some stuff to chew on Wink

Hope some of it is helpful.

Kapt.Krunch

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