Report from ARSC – Everybody Has Something Ann Blonston represented Airshow’s Restoration Center at the 2015 ARSC conference in Pittsburgh in late May. She describes the event as a entertaining mash-up of archive professionals and obsessive collectors. In these modern times, we have hundreds of thousands of recorded media items available to be listened to […]
I returned from the annual AES (Audio Engineering Society) Convention in Los Angeles, held there after a 12-year hiatus. (AES has dropped San Francisco as a west coast convention site.) I love San Francisco, but it was great to be back in LA where so much of the music, film, and recording industry is based. […]
Setting Up Your Studio to Work Efficiently for Tape Recording Now that you have your tape deck and have completed the basic maintenance on it you can take a look at the gain-staging of your whole recording setup. Most professional studio equipment is designed to operate at a nominal +4dBu; when a VU meter on your tape deck or […]
Care and Maintenance OK, now you own a cool new (old) analog tape deck. The first thing to know is that tape recorders should be aligned before every session! The tape path should be cleaned every time you change a reel of tape, or more frequently. I often clean the heads before playback of each […]
Over the last couple years, I’ve had a remarkable number of projects come through my mastering studio originating on tape. Some of these projects involve restoration on past work of notable artists including the Grateful Dead and Doc Watson, but many are new recordings by artists intrigued by the unique quality of analog sound and […]
