Archival equipment

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The webmaster has the following equipment at his disposal to digitize or transfer several different formats.

Magnetic media

Audio cassette tapes

Nakamichi Cassette Deck 1

  • Three head, asymmetrical dual capstan transport with pressure pad lifter
  • Manual playback azimuth adjustment, allowing best frequency response of a tape that was recorded on any other device
  • Output stage:
    • 6 foot premium 3.5mm to RCA cable -> ASUS Xonar DX sound card (32-bit depth and 96khz sample rate) -> Adobe Audition CC 2014.2 (32/96)
    • Each tape is fully wound (fast forwarded) and then rewound to ensure tape spools are properly packed with the least amount of potential friction due to lengthy storage
    • Azimuth is optimized per tape, sometimes per each individual tape's side

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

VHS / S-VHS

  • No appreciable equipment currently. Working on acquiring a high-end PAL S-VHS set up, including high-end JVC or Panasonic VCR with built-in time base corrector, additional external time base corrector, and a capture card that can capture losslessly. NTSC S-VHS VCR to come afterwards (fewer recordings are on NTSC format, thus lower priority).

Optical Media

Compact Discs / CD-R

DVD

  • ImgBurn to make ISOs
  • PgcDemux to demux audio soundtracks to their native formats

BD

  • Not applicable at this time

MiniDisc

  • No MiniDisc equipment currently; will acquire equipment when recordings on MiniDisc are lended to me for digital transfer