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.

Magnetic media

Audio cassette tapes

Nakamichi Dragon

• Three head, asymmetrical dual direct-drive capstan auto-reverse transport with pressure pad lifter ensuring the absolute lowest possible wow & flutter of any cassette deck
• Automatic playback azimuth adjustment, yielding best frequency response of a tape that was recorded on any other device

• 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 clean, relube, alignment, and incorporation of all the beneficial upgrades done from the factory on later serial number Dragons based on the service manual. Power supply capacitors were upgraded and up-rated, and several capacitors in the playback amplifier section were replaced with higher quality ones. The tape auto-stop sense bulbs were replaced with LEDs for reliability, and a regular three-prong IEC power socket was installed for convenience sake. The deck is connected to a line-conditioning uninterruptible power supply using a server-grade heavy-duty 8-foot 14AWG power cable.
• 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 Creative ASIO
  • 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.

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

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 to 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 to demux audio soundtracks to their native formats

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
• 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 Audio Cable 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)