[Dtb-talk] digitizing 4-track recordings

[Peter Donahue]

Hello Aaron and everyone,

    While I hesitated to post this as it's a, "Gray area" where this list is
concerned perhaps it's related in that some of us are interested in
digitizing books and other material recorded on 4-track cassettes to create
DAISY books, or for some other use. I'd be curious to hear what some of you
do to improve the audio quality of books digitized from an analog source
such as books recorded at half speed and made available on 4-track cassette.
Is it better to produce a digital rendering from books recorded on 2-tracks
and played at1 and 7.8 IPS, or are there ways to improve the quality of
material digitized directly from 4-track cassette recordings? Am I better
off to use a digital workstation for making the initial digital masters, or
can I do this just as easily with a digital/audio processing program like
Sound Forge? What settings do you recommend for both options. I'm planning
to get a digital/audio workstation in the next few months so will have a
mixer at my disposal to assist in this process and for other uses.

    Thanks for your feedback. Your suggestions will be very much
appreciated.

Peter Donahue


From: "Aaron Cannon" <cannona at fireantproductions.com>
To: "Discussion of Digital Talking Books" <dtb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2006 4:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Dtb-talk] Converting tone indexed books to DAISY


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While you are correct, that doesn't fit the current issue.  We aren't
recording and playing back at high speeds, we are playing back at high speed
something that was recorded at a slow speed.  Nevertheless, you are correct
that theoretically it shouldn't matter how fast we play it back.  However,
we are using noncommercial equipment and it probably can't faithfully
reproduce the audio, especially when we're talking about frequencies which
are beyond those normally heard by humans.

Every time we double the speed, we double the frequency, hence half of our
bandwidth is lost.  It might be worth trying to record at 96KHZ while
playing at 4x speed, but my guess is that the problem isn't in the recorder,
but rather in the player being able to reproduce frequencies 4 times those
for which it was designed.  It's just my guess though, the problem may be
somewhere else entirely.


Aaron Cannon


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- ----- Original Message -----
From: <DanFlasar at aol.com>
To: <dtb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2006 2:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Dtb-talk] Converting tone indexed books to DAISY


> Actually, there is no reason to assume that copying at  high speed makes
> any
> difference in quality.  In the days of reel-to-reel  recording, the slower
> speeds offered the least quality, probably because you had  less
> 'granularity' on
> the tape.  Hence the faster speeds offered the best  reproduction.  I'm
> sure
> there has to be a limit to the speed but industrial  recording dupers run
> at
> very high speeds indeed and the quality is fine.
> Dan
>


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