Cassettes
- Date added:
- Thursday, 11 September 2008
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Answer
Preparing masters that will turn into great analog cassettes
So, if you're sending a DAT to a cassette duplicator, and you deem it "cassette ready" then include a tone at your equivalent of 0 VU for balance and level reference. I mean 0 VU as read on the VU meter, not on the peak meter!
Ideally, for best performance on a high-speed bin loop, to avoid high-frequency overloads, your material should not peak at higher than 3-5 dB above that test tone as seen on the DAT's peak meter. This obviously means a great deal of compression and/or limiting must be applied!
Short peaks above that can sometimes be tolerated, but not if they have too much high-frequency content. It is a difficult equation, and it is better to do general overall limiting, not just high frequency limiting.
The cassette medium is extremely unforgiving. This is largely due to the need to use a reasonable quality, reasonable priced "Chrome-like" stock. It would break your bankbook if we were to use high end stock like you buy in the store. It's just not practical to use, for example, TDK stock in a production environment when making cassettes for resale at reasonable prices.
What level on the DAT (or CDR) should be 0 vu in this case? If we're demanding only a 5 dB peak to average ratio, of course in theory you could put a tone at -5 dBFS. I would compromise and put a tone at -10 to -14 dBFS and make sure the material does not exceed 5 dB above that, which means, of course, your DAT will never see 0 dBFS (or even -6 dBFS!).
If you do not precompress, then as I said above, we will prepare the bin loop master with some compression, to protect the poor cassette tape from saturating. If we're making your CD master, we'll probably make the cassette master from the CD master, applying additional compression for the cassette.
Bob