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anonymous 22 September 2003

does anyone have a recommendation on making a home made 2 inch mrl?

Comments

RecorderMan Mon, 09/22/2003 - 21:04

Originally posted by mrbrigante:
does anyone have a recommendation on making a home made 2 inch mrl?

borrow a real one and do really good alignment, including azimuth on your deck. If you can afford it ahve a tech come out and do this initial setup and alignment, degause, azimuth, tension, etc. (if not do a good job yourself...you can do azimut with jsut the setero bus meters if you need to...don't even need a scope!)
Then, put up a reel of fresh tape (your house brand), and print tones. Print at least 2 minutes of 1K, 10K, 1 minute of 15K, 2 minutes of 100hz and a minute of 50hz. this will take about 8 minutes of tape.You could make two of these with one real and put one away for emergencies. It's not technically perfect but it will allow you to keep your deck lined up and referenced well enough. The long time for the primary tones (you can even go 3 minutes) means you can align all 24track in one pass, no stopping...makes alignment even quicker and easier.

sheet Tue, 09/23/2003 - 05:14

If you are talking about multitrack or master recorder, then you will be best served by a used Studer A80, in my opinion. There are plenty out there, and they can be had for $10k on up, depending on hours/condition. Then once you get it, you should have it gone through. Tech time can be had here for $50/hr. YMMV.

If you can't swing that, I would go down in track count and buy a Studer 8-track. I have three. Want one?

KurtFoster Tue, 09/23/2003 - 20:49

The cost of the tech to come out to set up your machine would probably be as much as a MRL tape would cost. Also MRLs are printed full width without tracks. This is how they can work for 16 and 24 tracks. There is a thing called fringe effect and I think that a "tone tape" made with with your 2" machine would display this effect. The MRL tapes are fringe compensated ... some times you just have to bite the bullet and do what is needed. This is one of them. Just buy a MRL tape for your machine and be done with it. Actually, you probably should have been givin one by the person who you purchased the machine from..

MPlancke Mon, 09/29/2003 - 13:08

Originally posted by Kurt Foster:

Also MRLs are printed full width without tracks. This is how they can work for 16 and 24 tracks. There is a thing called fringe effect and I think that a "tone tape" made with with your 2" machine would display this effect. The MRL tapes are fringe compensated ... some times you just have to bite the bullet and do what is needed. This is one of them.

Unfortunately, you've got it backwards Kurt.

Because the MRL tapes are recorded full track they have this fringing effect which is why you can't accurately align the low frequency EQ using a test tape. That's why you must set the low frequency EQ using a tone that you record and monitor from the playback head.

Here's the quote from Choosing and Using Calibration Tapes from the MRL site.

5.1.1 Fringing Effect
When any full-track tape (for instance one of these Calibration tapes) is reproduced on any multi-track reproducer, the recording is wider than the intended reproducing head, and this causes a measuring error called fringing. This causes both an apparent rise in low-frequency response of the reproducer, and also increased undulations of the low-frequency response ("head bumps").

Just buy a MRL tape for your machine and be done with it.

Absolutely 100% right on! There is no substitute period.

http://www.flash.net/~mrltapes/ is the place for all things MRL related.

Here's a PDF document on choosing and using MRL tapes which is a good place to start.

http://www.flash.net/~mrltapes/choo&u.pdf

IIRC You can buy a "shorty" 3 tone tape for pretty low money. If you own an analog machine you need a MRL calibration tape, end of story.

Mark

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