Archival equipment

The webmaster has the following equipment at his disposal to digitize, transfer, and capture several different media formats. All recordings are mastered while listening to Audio-Technica ATH-M50S Professional Studio Monitor Headphones. Scans of tape inlays, photographs, info sheets, etc are done using a Canon CanoScan LiDE 60.

Magnetic media

Audio cassette tapes

Nakamichi Dragon

• Three discrete heads with asymmetrical dual direct-drive capstan auto-reverse transport and pressure pad lifter that ensures the absolute lowest possible wow & flutter of any cassette deck.
• Nakamichi Automatic Azimuth Correction (NAAC): automatic playback head azimuth adjustment, yielding the best possible frequency response from a tape that was recorded on any other deck.

• Upgraded with Maxim MAX4066 CMOS switches for improved sound quality over the factory 4066 chips, with additional level translation circuit to maximize benefit of the improved switches.
• Professionally serviced by Perry, involving:
  • New belts and idler tire.
  • Full tear-down, cleaning, relubrication, and alignment of the transport.
  • Incorporation of all beneficial and incremental upgrades performed at the factory on later serial number Dragons, based on the service manual and service bulletins.
  • Several capacitors in the playback amplifier section were replaced with higher quality ones.
  • A mu-metal shield was installed above the playback amplifier section to prevent electromagnetic interference from the auto-azimuth board from affecting the signal path.
  • Power supply capacitors were upgraded and up-rated, and a regular three-terminal C14 IEC power socket was installed for convenience. The deck is connected to a line-conditioning APC uninterruptible power supply using a server-grade heavy-duty 8-foot 14AWG power cable.
  • The tape auto-stop sense bulbs were replaced with LEDs for reliability.
• This Dragon is serial number 4964.

• Wow & flutter captures, tested against A.N.T. Audio combination setup tape U04103-70A (serial 150505), as well as a frequency response graph of record & playback of a 20hz - 20khz sweep on a Sony Metal XR-60 cassette tape:

• Wfgui-fwd.png

  Forward playback

• Wfgui-rev.png

  Reverse playback

• Drag4964sonyxr.jpg

  Frequency response graph, 20hz - 20khz sweep

• Output stage:
  • Blue Jeans Cable LC-1 Low Capacitance 8-foot RCA cable -> Creative Sound Blaster ZxR sound card (RCA Line In) with 123dB input signal-to-noise ratio (captured at 32-bit depth and 88.2khz sample rate) -> Adobe Audition CC 2015 recording at 32-bit depth 88.2khz sample rate using Windows Audio Session API (WASAPI).
  • Each tape is fully wound (fast forwarded) and then rewound to ensure tape spools are packed with the least amount of potential stiction that may result from a long time spent in storage. Output level on deck is always at maximum, unless clipping occurs. Line-in input volume is always at maximum on the computer.
  • Furthermore, the tape is fast-forwarded to a point on the tape containing a lot of high-energy treble content and then played for NAAC to lock on to the best azimuth, then the tape is rewound and playback restarted again to have the optimal playback azimuth set from the beginning. This avoids the deck hunting for several seconds once the music begins; the azimuth adjustment is sometimes audible on the recording when this occurs.

• Final delivery format:
  • The audio will be encoded as FLAC (level 8 [maximum] compression) using FLAC 1.3.1 64-bit, to 16-bit depth (dithering enabled) and 44.1kHz using foobar2000 v1.3.9 and its Resampler (SoX) component set at best quality. If the audio has significant frequencies above 22kHz, a high-resolution 24/88.2 version may also be provided. The audio is initially captured at the odd 88.2kHz sample rate because it likely resamples better to the CD-audio 44.1kHz standard as it is a 2:1 ratio, versus 96kHz which is a 2.177:1 ratio.

Digital Audio Tape (DAT)

Sony SDT-9000 SCSI DAT drive

• Flashed with firmware that is able to read audio DATs
• Most direct option to rip audio DATs to WAV format in their native sample rate (i.e. 16-bit 32khz / 44.1khz / 48khz)
• Allows error correction which no standalone DAT deck / recorder can perform
• Regularly cleaned according to manufacturer recommendations using "new old stock" Seagate DAT head cleaning tapes
• DATs ripped using dat2wav software on a dedicated Windows XP Service Pack 2 computer

VHS / S-VHS

PAL

• Philips VR1000 (JVC rebadge; for PAL tapes) with built-in line time base corrector
• DataVideo TBC-1000 full-frame time base corrector
• ATI All-In-Wonder 9600XT AGP video card for lossless Huffyuv AVI captures using VirtualDubMod, captured on a dedicated Windows XP Service Pack 2 computer
  • Other general computer specifications: HP Compaq d530 CMT computer with Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.2ghz with HyperThreading, 1.75GB DDR-400 RAM, 80GB Western Digital Velociraptor + 500GB Western Digital Blue hard drives, Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
• Audio captured at PCM 16-bit 96khz using Monoprice Premium 6 foot RCA to 3.5mm 22AWG gold plated cable to Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card through VirtualDubMod

I am still working on obtaining a high-end NTSC S-VHS VCR.

Optical Media

Compact Discs / CD-R

• The latest version of Exact Audio Copy configured with optimal settings for a perfect rip
  • Optical drive used does not affect the result of the rip

DVD

• ImgBurn to make ISOs
• PgcDemux or DVD Audio Extractor (if PgcDemux doesn't work) to demux audio soundtracks directly to the original format present on the DVD

BD

• Not applicable at this time due to no Blu-Ray bootlegs existing that need to be ripped; as far as I know, only one or two BD recordings have been torrented on DIME

MiniDisc

Sony MDS-S707 MiniDisc deck

• Optical output is used for digitally bit-perfect captures
• Digitally captured using the optical input of Creative Sound Blaster ZxR sound card, recorded using Adobe Audition CC 2015 at 16-bit depth and 44.1khz sample rate using Creative ASIO
• Many thanks to Ryan Jonik for his generous contribution of the MD deck

Vinyl / LP

Audio-Technica AT-LP120-USB Direct-Drive Professional Turntable + Shure M97xE Cartridge

• Output stage:
  • Blue Jeans Cable LC-1 Low Capacitance 8-foot RCA cable -> Creative Sound Blaster ZxR sound card (RCA Line In) with 123dB input signal-to-noise ratio (captured at 32-bit depth and 96khz sample rate) -> Adobe Audition CC 2015 (recording at 32/96)