[LAU] USB interface for backing up old tracks mastered on cassette

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 2019-01-21 at 09:53 +0000, Jordan Muscott wrote:
> Thanks to Jeremy, Will, Ralf and everyone else who replied. I've tgken
> it all onboard.
> I've got a Yamaha-KX550 cassette deck which I'm happy with as the
> source. I have to admit I'm not convinced an entry level sound device
> won't be plagued by noise or other quality problems even if the
> converters it has are decent, but I'm yet to decide how much money I
> am prepared to spend :)
> All the best,
> Jordan.

You are welcome!

I found a review https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/yamaha/k-540.shtml.

It seems to be a pretty good tape deck.

It's a pity that it has got no bias adjust. My Yamaha MT44D also has got
no bias adjust, so I needed to test buy different cassettes and if one
was very good, I needed to visit the same shop again and buy a bunch of
cassettes from the same spread. OTOH I owned a cheap AIWA stereo tape
deck with a manual (not an automatic) bias adjust, IIRC it was not that
picky as the Yamaha 4-track, but IIRC still picky regarding the chosen
cassettes.

Regarding playback I wonder how old your tape cassettes are. I mastered
a lot on stereo cassette tapes as well as on DAT. I don't own a good
working cassette player anymore and no working DAT player at all. For
the analog tapes I wonder how much highs got lost and how audible the
"copy/crosstalk" effect is (I don't know what it is called, if you hear
the beginning of a song in the silence before the song, that is caused
by the winding, the reason that professional tapes are stored rewound).
And I wonder, if anything happened to the DAT tapes. Btw. if I should
find the time to borrow the professional DAT player from a friend, I
guess I would use AES/EBU of my RME card and the DAT player to copy the
DAT tapes to the PC. If the Linux driver shouldn't work, I would install
Windows. On Linux at least ADAT of my RME card is broken.