the dead media: Blog

ever wondered why 80s vinyl sounds so thin and crappy?
 
i got the scoop recently from my very knowledgeable friend paul millar - an analog tape, vintage synthesizer, and electronics repair savant. 
 
there are two audio signals required to cut vinyl - preview and main - with a .9 second delay in between.  the preview signal is used to analyze what will be sent to the cutter head.  it monitors any volume spikes that would cause a needle to jump grooves when playing.  before the 80s, the preview signal was sent via special .09 second delay tape head configuration to analog compression/limiting devices to level the spikes before reaching the cutter head.  once digital came on the scene in the early 80s, vinyl cutting services switched to using digital delay devices because they were extremely smaller, easier to maintain, and less expensive.  so excited about the "new toy", engineers must have imagined that the audio signal sounded just as good or good [...]

i'm surprised hi-fi vcrs were never marketed toward the home-studio musician/engineer in the 80s/90s. if they had been, i think it would have made a huge impact on the music industry. that is, because the average home recordist would have been able to attain cd/digital bandwidth quality much sooner than hard-drive/cd recorders were commercially available, and so much cheaper than DAT recorders were at the time. like, 20 dollars for a used hi-fi vcr vs. 400 dollars for a bugdet DAT recorder. all this, while keeping the music in the analog domain. a hifi vcr is a high quality analog tape recorder, but not in the traditional sense. most people didn't know about this feature. this can be done and sounds so good because of the unusual technology used in recording onto vhs tape. a hifi vcr is basically two self contained fm radio stations being listened to at the same time. therefore it's not just regular "analog", but "fm analog". the left audio channel is "tuned" to one station, the right [...]