Scotch "Classic"...more top-of-the-line

This morning I popped open a Scotch "Classic" cartridge for comparison
to Ampex's 389 "Grand Master." Few surprises here, and I believe that
Classic is the same stuff as Scotch 306-307 RTR tape on a .5 mil,
graphite coated backing. Again, I'd like to soon cut the splice and
run tests on my Ampex to confirm, but I'm pretty sure this is the same
oxide.

Scotch "Classic" is a little "colder" than the Ampex 389, by about 2
dB. The noise is a very small 1 dB quieter. Thus, we get into the
"sliding scale" thing where sensitivity goes down along with noise,
achieving about the same result overall. Scotch has more headroom
than most 8 tracks could ever handle, as with Ampex 389, and takes
Dolby "B" encoding at the same level you'd hit the tape without it,
with no appreciable saturation of high frequencies, making it another
great "home listening" tape. Wow and flutter performance was about on
a par with 389 also; 3M's cartridge seem to outperform Ampex slightly
in this area overall.

Now, to how 3M and Sanyo marketed both this tape and the "Sanyosak"
8056 and 8075, and their technical slight of hand. "Classic" is a far
better tape than 175 or Dynarange, no doubt..enough, in point of fact,
to make it sound too bright and too loud when using the standard NAB
3180/50 µS equalization, the same playback gain, and the same bias as
for 175 and Dynarange. 3M's solution? Leave the bias where it was at
and fudge the equalization! What that "normal/special" switch does is
place a ground in the middle of the record equalization network, thus
changing its characteristics in the high end. In simple terms, it
cuts the highs more...that's it! It has no effect on bias (where it
really should) and it was done basically to make the "Classic" tape
compatable with lesser tapes on playback. In short, it's a cheap
solution to a more complex problem. Doing this makes the tape sound
fine, although it fails to properly exploit the real advantages of its
oxide. 3M used this switch on the packaging of its "Classic" tape to
sell its Sanyosak 8075s, saying that this "special" switch should be
used when using this improved tape. Not doing so yields an overly
bright sounding recording when played back on standard EQ decks.

Economical, sure, but this cheap solution fails to take full advantage
of this far better tape. To be fair, though, 3M was the only maker to
even address the issue at all. The "shrillness" caused by not using
the fudged record EQ curve is a sign that the tape can take some more
bias. When this is done, you flatten the response back down AND
increase MOL, thus further decreasing signal-to-noise ratio. In other
words, the "special switch" was a cheap and dirty fix that doesn't
yield optimal results. By increasing bias current in the normal way,
I was able to get performance roughly equal to Ampex 389; by just
using that front panel switch, I got performance just a little bit
better than Dynarange. This same was true when testing 389; rebiasing
using standard 3180/50 µS EQ gave superlative results, while using the
"special" switch gave about half that all around. What's telling
here, though, is that even with mofications to the bias circuit, I was
giving all the current to the erase gap that the onboard bias coil
could give...there just ain't no more! This is another cheap 'n
dirty, since inductive coupling from the erase gap to the R/P gap is
what biases the recording process on these decks at all. It may have
also been done since they knew that the record amps weren't all that
brawny to begin with; it's a fact that I can clip the record amp
section while recording on "Classic" or Ampex 389 before I hit the 2%
THD fluxivity of the tape itself, meaning the machines just can't
fully take advantage of all that these tape have to offer. Put
simply: these tapes are better than the machines they were marketed
for.

What's interesting about both of these "high end" cartridges is that
they expose the absolute top end of performance that can be achieved
with the 8 track format, which is to say that, to get RTR-quality
performance, you need both these tape formulations and Dolby "B" to
get anywhere near RTR at 7½ IPS. Further, it's pretty obvious that
the heads on the Sanyosak 8075 have their gaps optimized for slower
speed. With both Ampex 389 and Scotch "Classic," the -3 dB point was
at a lofty 15 KHz, about as high as one can expect on this format with
everything being aligned to perfection. I bring this up because
professional RTRs (Ampexes, Scullys, etc.) operating at 3¾ IPS speed
can't do more than about 8 KHz due to gap spacing on both the record
and playback heads, which is optimized usually for 15 IPS. Using a
special slow speed capstan motor on my 351, the standard Ampex 2 track
heads are only able to get -3 dB almost a full octave below the 8075,
just shy of 8 Khz, strictly because of this condition. Many top-end
consumer grade decks had narrower gaps more optimized toward 7½ IPS,
which thus improved 3¾ IPS performance as well. Special slave deck
heads optimized for slower speeds are "unobtainium" for Ampexes these
days from anyone, due to the discontinuance years ago of real-time
duplicating in favor of economically attractive high speed
duplication.

This is where 8 track was left in the dust. Most cheap 8 track
hardware used heads that used older, cheaper manufacturing technology
in their making that couldn't provide narrow enough gaps to provide
the top end that the 8075 and other top end machines of the era can.
When Philips set about on their campaign to oust 8 track in favor of
their "dictaphone" Audio Cassette in the '70s, new manufacturing
techniques were quickly developed, notably in Japan, to make these
exceedingly narrow gaps a mass production reality, thus allowing even
better frequency response on tape moving at half the speed. This,
coupled with the attractive small packaging of cassette and its far
better reliability, doomed 8 track almost immediately, even though
performance initially wasn't all that good. I noted that the head
used in the 8075 is a bit more of a sophisticated piece of work than
those found in the 8055 and 8056, which are identical, and the view
under 20X magnification shows a narrower gap on the 8075 indeed. Akai
was evidently doing the same thing with their stuff at the time,
trying to close up the gaps to get better playback response. They may
have gone too far; Akai 8 track decks have unacceptably weak bass
performance, as shown by their own published specifications. More on
that later.

However, it was pretty obvious by the time that these machines came
out that the audiophile market had summarily dismissed 8 track as a
"garbage" format and openly embraced cassette, even though performance
of those early top-loading machines was far from stellar. When the
truly good machines started showing up in the late '70s, though, it
was all over for 8 track; a good Dolby "B" cassette deck could
outperform most 8 track recorders on top end and still be competitive
on noise floor when using Type II and Type III oxides while yielding
the benefits of greater reliability and a storage footprint less than
half the size of the bulky cartridges. Cassette also has the
mechanical advantage of working equally well in any position; try
playing an 8 track (or any broadcast cartridge) upside down for a few
minutes and see how little time it takes it to jam.

However, 8 track still held an advantage of higher tape speed which,
with the lousy heads of its heyday, didn't give it the advantage over
later cassette machines in top end, but did yield smoother bass
response. Again, the format was victim to the hardware offered to
play it on; many 8 track decks would only allow bass down to 60 or 70
Hz (Akai specs its machines at a too-high 60 Hz, while Radio Trash's
models were even worse at 70; portables and car players? Forget it).
The Sanyosak goes all the way down to 30 at -3 dB per my MRL
mutli-freq alignment cart (a REAL alignment tape, not a "NudoFraud"
posuer), about as good as one could expect on tape at 3¾ IPS without
getting into fringing problems with the super narrow tracks. I can't
figure out why, then, the manufacturers would offer machines, both
players and recorders, with such lousy low end response. When it's on
the tape, 8 track's bass response is better than any cassette simply
by rule of geometry; cassette suffers from bass "self erasure" due its
slow speed across the head gap, no matter how good the signal being
fed to the head's pole pieces. Simply stated, it's physically
impossible for cassette to give the same bass performance as 8 track
UNLESS you scooch the tape speed up to 3¾ IPS. When that's done, the
two are comparable.

As said earlier, there were several makers of top-end cassette decks
back in their heyday that offered dual speed machines, Denon and
Nakamichi being the ones which really touted its capabilities. I
remember Julian Hirsch putting a new Denon through its paces, and
finding that at 3¾ IPS, a Maxell UDXL-II cassette could top 25 KHz
almost flat...one helluva feat for even an Ampex 440 at 15 IPS...with
a much higher MOL. Of course, performance in the bass region was
still far short of even 7½ IPS RTR, but the overall performance of
this Denon cassette deck beat all consumer grade RTRs from the '60s
and '70s by a mile. Philips, by this time, had invested a large
amount of R&D funding in developing the Audio CD in partnership with
Sony, and nixed the use of double speed cassettes on the legal point
that it violated Philips' tight constraints on licensing
specifications; if it was a Philips-licensed cassette (as they all
are), it HAD to run at 1 7/8 IPS, and the dual speed machines
disappeared over night. Of course, this was done to cripple cassette,
as Sony and Philips had an agenda to replace it with CD-A in a couple
of short years. RIAA members loved this too, thinking that a playback
only format would limit frauding and bootlegging, of which they
considered double speed cassettes to be a formidable threat. However,
they didn't see Sony's DATs, high speed internet and the CD-ROM coming
until it was too late.

Back to the topic at hand finally, I find both the Ampex and Scotch
high end tapes to be worth the extra trouble it takes to find and buy,
but only for home listening on a good deck feeding audiophile gear.
It'd be "pearls before swine" to use one of these in a "spaceball" or
"detonator," or even the cheap shoebox "console top" players that
populate sleazeBay by the dozens. If you have the gear to take
advantage of what these oxides offer, great. If not,
fuhgeddaboudit...you're wasting your time and money. Now, the
question to me is: If I record on one of these hot tapes on 8 track,
is it worse, equal, or better than my cassette decks? Another
shoot-out for another time. Right now, I'm busy repairing more broken
factory splices on Columbia TC8s. Funny...in 25 years of usage, I've
NEVER had to repair a cassette of any make or age...for any reason.
Repairing 8 track cartridges seems to be a career move in and of
itself just to keep the fuggin' things running...the real reason
behind 8 track's speedy demise.

dB

the tech probs truly were the cause of the decline of the 8.
However, I do have a 'shoebox' size deck, a sylvania quad, and it has
shockingly good sound, especially in the high end.
It also has minimal crosstalk tho I would say the bass isn't as good as
my akai cr80dss, even tho you panned the akai's bass, my ears say
otherwise. I pump that through a technics quad receiver then to
Electrovoice Patrician speakers, which happen to be the envy of all my
friends )
The bass will truly kick yer booty through 22 inch woofs !

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:29:31 -0500, (lennon fan)
wrote:

the tech probs truly were the cause of the decline of the 8.
However, I do have a 'shoebox' size deck, a sylvania quad snip

If I'm not mistaken, those were US made...some of the last of the
breed. GTE, after taking over Sylvania, offshored almost all of its
non-government operations in the early '80s, with the help of the
RayGunFraud Administration's tax loopholes, a problem that still
exists today.

my akai cr80dss, even tho you panned the akai's bass, my ears say
otherwise. I pump that through a technics quad receiver then to
Electrovoice Patrician speakers snip

WOW...E-V Patricians! Now THERE'S a speaker to reckon with! Still
pale in comparison to my custom Klipschorns, however. :-D

The bass will truly kick yer booty through 22 inch woofs ! snip

I can only speak about Akais from thief own published specs, but I've
not seen them for the CR80SS. I know the CR83D said it was -3 dB at
60 Hz, which is pretty bad. I do not know about the response of the
glass head model. I know the Sanyosak specifies response within the
±3 dB range down to 30 Hz, and the MRL alignment tape confirms this.
On record/playback, 30 Hz is only 1 dB below reference @ 1 KHz, and
that's at reference fluxivity, something cassette can only dream
about, usually. I remember years ago toying with my uncle's Radio
Trash RS-8XX, and it cut off rather steeply at 75 Hz...OK for
portables, lousy for fidelity of any kind, except for voice.

What the "ears say" has little bearing on reality, as has been known
for decades. In the age of miniaturization of loudspeakers in the
'60s, it was found that a great way to "fool" the ears (brains,
actually) of most listeners was to create a "mid bass hump" in
response centered around 150 Hz. The uneducated ear would interpret
this higher sensitivity in this narrow region as "better" bass, when
actually, the bass response was worse. This was part of the reason
for the success of the power hungry AR line of "acoustic suspension"
loudspeakers. Extreme (for those times) cone movement caused
excessive 2nd order harmonic distortion, which most listeners judged
to be "real" bass. A trip to the anechoic chamber with some B&K
instrumentation proved quickly otherwise; there wasn't much "real"
bass to ARs, but LOTS of 2nd harmonic distortion, which functioned the
same as the "mid bass hump" so popular in 1960s designs from such
builders as Jensen and E-V in their "bookcase" sized systems.

Due to the effects of geometry of analog tape moving at slow speeds
across head gaps, the same thing can (and does) happen; exaggerated
mid bass response, usually at multiples of the longitudinal gap width
of the gap in the pole pieces when compared to the wavelength of the
frequency involved. Thus, you'd get the same effect...a "mid bass
hump" with deteriorated real bass response. What's interesting is
when these same ears hear the really low distortion bass of a
Klipschorn or a really good JBL studio monitor; they think they are
lacking in bass, when in actuality, they're better in response than
what they're used to hearing. Much research was done on this
phenomenon, and some of it's available by browsing various sites. Jim
Lansing and Paul Klipsch wrote numerous papers on the subject for the
AES in those days, which are available if you're a member.

Still and all, the Patricians were NOT designs that adhered to this
flim-flam design philosophy, so I'd hazard to guess if you hear
(actually "feel") bass from them, it's got to be there! It's quite
possible that Akai understated their frequency response ±3 dB due to
the fairly wide excursions of response down in the bass region of any
slow moving tape. This is why professionals never recorded anything
at 7½ IPS; the treble might be OK, but the bass response was NEVER
flat. Problems with this are minimal at 15 IPS, and non-existant at
30.

dB

the e-v particians I have used a Klipsch design.
Mine are quite old (1948) and have been goosed in the high end with
additional mids and super tweet and crossovers in the 70's by a
recording engineer friend of mine who's since passed (which is how I got
these). They have beautiful mahogany cabinets and stand near 6 ft. tall,
39" wide 29" deep and each weighs well over 300 lbs!

Overall my main gripe about the 8 is the crosstalk or dragging both of
which affect quite a few tapes and must be compensated for (remember the
matchbook under the tape trick?) ))

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 20:24:14 -0500, (lennon fan)
wrote:

Overall my main gripe about the 8 is the crosstalk or dragging both of
which affect quite a few tapes and must be compensated for (remember the
matchbook under the tape trick?) )) snip

What's odd to me, seeing how everyone else is bothered by this
problem, is that I never have crosstalk problems (Noodles calls is
"ghosting" or some such crap) once I got the head aligned PROPERLY and
the positioning mechanism set and lubed right. I can only think of
one cart in my measly collection so far that's obviously recorded
badly. Iron particle application showed that one of the two heads
usually used on dupe slaved was WAY out of alignment vertically when
this tape was made. Fantasy...no surprise there! Also, the head on
the 8075 seems to be very well shielded, so I don't get hardly any
bass fringing from adjacent tracks, whereas I will on the cheaper 8055
and 8056, which use a different, presumably much cheaper head.

Oh yeah...the "matchbook under the cart trick"...sheezus, what a royal
pain in the ass, all to make up for that idiotic fixed pinch roller
disaster. Sorry, but Muntz had it right with 4 track, and the
broadcast industry had it right with Fidelipak. Lear got it
WRONG....SO wrong, it's SCREWED! :Þ

dB

DoucheBoB wrote in message . ..
This morning I popped open a Scotch "Classic" cartridge for comparison
to Ampex's 389 "Grand Master." Few surprises here, and I believe that
Classic is the same stuff as Scotch 306-307 RTR tape on a .5 mil,
graphite coated backing. Again, I'd like to soon cut the splice and
run tests on my Ampex to confirm, but I'm pretty sure this is the same
oxide.

You have yet to post a concise, well documented best to worst blank
tape list. Instead, you're posting volumes of monologue. You are
rating these tapes using a scope- in real listening tests, the
differences would be un-noticeable.

Wow and flutter performance was about on
a par with 389 also; 3M's cartridge seem to outperform Ampex slightly
in this area overall.

You can't rate wow/flutter on a 25 year old tape, that hasn't first
been opened and lubed.

Now, to how 3M and Sanyo marketed both this tape and the "Sanyosak"
8056 and 8075, and their technical slight of hand.

You keep saying "Sanyosak"- Ampex made copies of the Wolly decks too-
I have one. Identical to a Wolly 8050 inside, in every respect.

decks.

What's interesting about both of these "high end" cartridges is that
they expose the absolute top end of performance that can be achieved
with the 8 track format, which is to say that, to get RTR-quality
performance, you need both these tape formulations and Dolby "B" to
get anywhere near RTR at 7½ IPS.

You can buy an Akai 1800 reel to reel/8-track combo deck, it will
record 8-track carts at 7.5 IPS.

This is where 8 track was left in the dust. Most cheap 8 track
hardware used heads that used older, cheaper manufacturing technology
in their making that couldn't provide narrow enough gaps to provide
the top end that the 8075 and other top end machines of the era can.

8-track wasn't "left in the dust"- cassette was smaller, and more
reliable. And the new METAL TAPE formulation went to cassettes.
That's what enabled the cassette to give 8-track and R2R-like
performance. But with close listening, you can hear the high-end
limitations of any cassette. What cassettes DO have, is less
background noise and tape hiss- due to the lower tape speed. Take a
cassette deck and an Akai 8-track deck, put them both on "play" with
no tape in them (trick the cassette lever with your finger to get it
to play). Listen to the difference in background motor noise alone-
BIG difference.

Forget it).
The Sanyosak goes all the way down to 30 at -3 dB per my MRL
mutli-freq alignment cart (a REAL alignment tape, not a "NudoFraud"
posuer), about as good as one could expect on tape at 3¾ IPS without
getting into fringing problems with the super narrow tracks.

If you aligned a recorder deck with your so-called "multi-freq"
alignment tape, then you recorded a copy of that "multi-freq"
alignment tape on that same deck- you just made a dub that is dead
nuts on to the original- correct ?? That's not a "posuer", that's a
high quality copy made on an aligned deck. Same thing RCA, Ampex,
Columbia did when they made music tapes. Get over it.

Back to the topic at hand finally, I find both the Ampex and Scotch
high end tapes to be worth the extra trouble it takes to find and buy,
but only for home listening on a good deck feeding audiophile gear.
It'd be "pearls before swine" to use one of these in a "spaceball" or
"detonator," or even the cheap shoebox "console top" players that
populate sleazeBay by the dozens. If you have the gear to take
advantage of what these oxides offer, great. If not,
fuhgeddaboudit...you're wasting your time and money. Now, the
question to me is: If I record on one of these hot tapes on 8 track,
is it worse, equal, or better than my cassette decks? Another
shoot-out for another time. Right now, I'm busy repairing more broken
factory splices on Columbia TC8s. Funny...in 25 years of usage, I've
NEVER had to repair a cassette of any make or age...for any reason.
Repairing 8 track cartridges seems to be a career move in and of
itself just to keep the fuggin' things running...the real reason
behind 8 track's speedy demise.

dB the doucheBag

You seem to think you're now writing an editorial column for
Stereophile Magazine or something. "fuhgeddaboudit"- you are too
narrow minded to write anything that appeals to the masses.