Can we finally put Reel to Reel out of its misery? Put it to rest people.

Seriously?? Head azimuth **is** part of head alignment! Along with head height (on reel to reels). On a cassette deck azimuth is the only adjustment you get when aligning the heads. So on cassettes, azimuth and head alignment are exactly the same thing.

The reason I bring up cassette is that it’s a lot more annoying to make adjustments than on reel to reel, mostly you can’t trust cassettes to give you reliable results because the azimuth is always changing. Even if you adjust to a standard there will never be a correct azimuth when it comes to cassettes even on the best three heads decks. For that reason performance will always be lackluster unless you are making your own recordings. A good example are tapes recorded on Nak decks notoriously sound bad on non-Nak decks. On the other hand you would like to believe that reel to reel will give you more accurate results, but that too is not always the case.

http://www.tapeheads.net/showthread.php?t=70517

The best way I can describe it is this. The azimuth I refer to is what is printed on the tape in response to the record head. No one machine will have the same azimuth and no one tape will have the same azimuth. I bring this up to point out the performance of reel to reel will give you significantly better results than any cassette deck. Not because of the speed. Using the example of speed, 1⅞ ips can sound just as good at 15 ips except one will have more tape hiss. The difference is that reel to reel will always have greater frequency response because of the nature of its azimuth. The way the playback head is being used allows you to pull more information out of it.

Anyhow that has given me the best results so far listening back and fourth. That is how I squeeze the most information out of every tape that comes into my possession. I do not calibrate the machines I use in my lineup. Personal preference.

@clearthink

by the way VHS tape wears like crazy there is a lot of friction in there!

VHS makes a good comparison showcasing the differences between a linear format and helical. What makes helical scan unique is the heads are recessed VERY SLIGHTLY into the head drum. You’ll notice when observing one that you can’t even see the head clearly at first glance when looking at a head drum. All you see at first is shadow of the recessed cavity. Since the head is an electromagnetic device no contact is needed for pickup. Now that VHS is offload from the drum when playback is paused it lasts much longer than other tape formats. There is virtually no tape shedding. We’re talking about audio here, but color and picture information cannot fade overtime from video tape either which is engrained in the signal. It’s not like film.

That is one of the downsides to reel to reel is that they wear out much faster at higher speeds. Cassettes last much longer in that regard.

There were audio machines for both Beta and VHS back in the 1980s.

HiFi is a very underrated format for audio. Dynamic range and frequency response that matches CDs, and virtually zero tape hiss at speeds equivalent of 300 IPS with the moving heads (not a typo). It would have been real interesting to see helical technology being used in recording studios. A 16 track VHS deck would have been awesome to see. I would definitely prefer it to reel to reel. DAT format is not the same of course because that is a digital format. HiFi uses frequency modulation. They called it "poor man’s rtr". Funny enough I’ve considered making backup archives of my reel to reels to VHS.

This statement is false. I’ve seen them worn first-hand.

I should clarify this point. Ferrite heads can never really be relapped but they do fail. When I purchased my Teac 7030GSL with ferrite heads I brought them to John @ JRF Magnetics hoping to get them relapped. He informed me that he could not relap them because they were ferrite heads. We had to fit new metal heads on the Teac he found in his stock room that made a good fit. Often times when they fail overtime they become brittle and develop cracks until they shatter, but they don’t develop a flat spot because you can’t relap the glass that is encasing the ferrite without risking damage to the fragile glass. There are also two different kind of ferrite heads. I’m talking about the ones on consumer decks made by Akai and Teac. No one manufactures new ferrite heads anymore for this reason. Metal heads on the other hand as you know do wear down and develop flat spots very quickly but can be relapped very easily. They are also less noisy so it’s a trade off if you want longer lasting heads.

The most nonsensical and incompetent thread forever

The reason I bring up cassette is that it’s a lot more annoying to make adjustments than on reel to reel, mostly you can’t trust cassettes to give you reliable results because the azimuth is always changing.

Cassette alignment is very reliable. The real reason prerecorded stuff wasn’t that great was due to high speed replication. The replicators simply didn’t have the bandwidth. I’ve used pre-recorded tapes, listening to the high end, to align azimuth when replacing worn heads. The setting you get is the same as if you use a 10KHz tone on a calibration tape.

Ferrite heads can never really be relapped but they do fail.

Ferrite heads aren’t relapped because its not worth it. Relapping a head only works out if you have a more expensive part and nearly all ferrite cassette heads are inexpensive.

A 16 track VHS deck would have been awesome to see.

Trust me on this? They weren’t that awesome. The typical ’studio’ machines had the transport built into the mixer. They were considered semi-pro; the recording industry didn’t take VHS and Beta all that seriously even though they were a compact multichannel format. Their main downfall is they simply weren’t reliable for day in and day out 24/7 service, and when Something Bad happened the tape was often locked inside the transport; requiring a complete disassembly just to rescue a tape that might never play again. Thank goodness those days are past!!