Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellectronics
... I've discovered the best thing to do with old tapes is to match them to the same kind of machine they were made in, so it's no big surprise this 2 head akai from the 90s has done me so well, despite being mono...
|
I'm not sure this is generally true. VHS was a world standard and the aim was that a VHS tape could generally be played on any brand or model. In the early days of VTR's and VCR's this was much harder to achieve as production tolerances werent as tight as they would become. In the early days picture tracking was manually adjusted but auto tracking came along later.
Obviously you couldnt play a Long Play tape on a SP only deck, or a stereo tape on a mono deck and expect to hear stereo.
The usual reason a tape wont play well on a well maintained deck is because either it was recorded on a deck that had gone out of spec, or the playback deck is out of spec. Akai would have aligned their decks in the factory to the same specs as the other manufacturers, which were the VHS standards set down by JVC.
When a tape wont play well even on a perfectly aligned deck, we temporarily "misalign" the deck to the alignment of that tape. Sometimes the result is excellent, other times it's only partially successful. It depends on how far the recording deviated from the standard. But just blindly playing a misaligned tape on multiple decks hoping for the best result is expensive and time wasting. It's a little like listening to 10 different radios hoping that one of the radios will be tuned to our favourite station. So much quicker to just tune the one radio to the wanted station.