rollofone

Chris, Brad: First - we've got Klipsch monitors in the studio So - a good match. And I feel at home if people have suggestions on how to improve stuff. After all - nobody is in the possesion of the absolute knowledge. Chris: We don't use the exciter to "improve" the music. You are absolutely right: You would have to use the unit on a song by song measure if it would be your goal to push the audio. But that's not what we are doing. We are dealing with tapes (especially if 3 3/4 ips) that pretty much don't have anything from about 11 - 13 Khz upward. Just noise. So we're rolling this noise off and add a touch of exciter to re-create some upper harmonics. In other words: we exclusively use the unit to make up for losses due to the age and physical limitations of the tape. And those limitations are quite constant per side on a 4 track tape. If a tape varies in quality of the recording - and we have that from time to time - we notice that in our test runs and adjust the exciter (and other settings) accordingly in the transfer phase. But tapes like that usually have quite a few other problems and we use them only if it's a rare or special recording. As an example: We recently got Brubeck's "Time Out" - which is "the" must have recording for (almost) every Jazz fan. It was a marvelous copy with almost no need for any re-mastering ... for the first 10 minutes or so. It was warped at this point and spliced, the left channel dropped about 6db and the overall quality went from great to mediocre. We tried to get it back to par - but abondoned the tape after 4hrs of work. m.

Howdy folks: Lively discussion here. I appreciate that. Just a few things: Those tapes we are working on are old. About 40 years old. As in vintage. Some are brittle, misused, torn, some lost quite some dbs - mostly on one or another channel. We are trying to bring them back as good as possible. Though none of our tapes has earned a 5 out of 5 stars rating in our ears yet. We are trying to be as careful as possible. Sometimes it's just a matter of taste. Some people may find it to bright, others like to hear the cymbals and hi-hats in their fully glory. In any way - each tape has its MP3 preview - so people may decide for themselves if they like the "style" or not. And - if we were completely wrong - for whatever reason - we're happy to get that tape out of storage to look at it again. Have fun and enjoy music. Mike