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The following document is a more detailed explanation of what bias is and does, written in layman's terms. http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Library/Bias.pdf

DAT is not a reliable medium. The expansion and contraction of the base film of a DAT cassette in use is slightly greater than the tracking marks recorded onto the tape. This is an example of "cutting edge" technology were engineers pushed things just a bit beyond the limits of reliability. CDs...

The review above is how tape quality is determined. WernerO admitted that the tape does not sound bad, except for some compression effects, but the numbers indicate that there are far better tapes for far less money. Loading this tape into a housing with known wow and flutter problems makes the...

Tape engineers evaluate quality mainly on the basis of measurements, not just listening. For example, listening to the noise level of a pure chrome and then listening to the noise level of a ferric-cobalt generally suggests the two are not much different. However, listening to the noise level of...

The specifications for the tape do not match up with the marketing claims for its performance. The manufacturer's standard Type I tape was claimed to be a "superferric" that would outperform even the best Type II tapes of the past. Actual test results showed it to be a mechanically poor tape...

If the screeching is also heard through your speakers, it is severe modulation or "violining" that is caused by a number of problems. One problem would be debris, most often fatty acids that have oozed from tape, that sits on the heads and causes tape to stick to the head until the force of...

Not likely. It is not a premium tape and probably pre-dates the development of the unstable polyurethane that broke down. That does not mean that it will not shed oxide or stick to heads, but those symptoms would be due to other causes.

Pure chromium dioxide tapes lose a bit over 1 decibel of output in the first year or two, and the noise also goes down by the same amount. That means that the dynamic range remains the same, but Dolby NR tracking can be compromised. Chromium dioxide tape can also suffer from output losses and...

Test cassettes: the first two for proposed style, the third is for sound quality straight from Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs.

It is a basic ferric oxide tape. There were two tapes better at the time: Studio, which was a formulation with a more advanced oxide for better performance at slower speeds, and Professional, which was a back-coated ferric designed for 7.5 and 15 ips.

I don't know if BASF A.G. sold tape to TEAC for these cassettes, but I do know that any experimentation was confined to laboratories and not allowed out of the factory. The chrome and ferric audio tapes sold to duplicators had very tight tolerances, and any tape that slightly exceeded or fell...

High-speed duplication keeps the tape from direct contact with the duplication heads because at speeds of 80:1 there is an air barrier between tape and head. This the only thing I can think of that would make one method more "suitable" than the other. Unfortunately, the tape has to come into...

The use of chrome by duplicators was about 20% of the total production from music labels. WEA temporarily tried TDK SA but soon gave that up. No other major music label or major duplicator used cobatl-enhanced ferric tape. Many duplicators used digital bins with HX Pro on the slaves for either...

LP35 simply means "long play, 35-micron total thickness." It is a basic ferric tape. If it were a higher quality version, it might be LP35 LH for "low noise, high output" or LHS for "low noise, high output super" for decent recordings at slower speeds.. The R in a tape series simply meant the...

Chromium dioxide formulations have less noise than ferric tape by their very nature. It's due to the shape of the particle and the ability to align the particles better when coating. A chrome tape should not sound brighter than a ferric if the equalization and bias are set correctly. The chrome...

Yes. The date on the A&M albums is the date of the first issue of the album. All subsequent releases use the original release date unless the issue is a remastered version.

Ghost in the Machine using 120-microsecond EQ is probably a reissue. Supertramp's Famous Last Words was the first A&M release on BASF chrome tape, and it was recorded for 70-microsecond playback. We introduced the band at an AES (Audio Engineering Society) convention that November when we had a...

There was no need. The "slack" you refer to is the amount of tape remaining blank when recording an album on a fixed-length C-60 or C-90. Tape duplicators recorded albums on tapes that were cut and spliced at the end of the album, no matter how short it may have been. There was little "slack" on...

Yes, chrome, ferric-cobalt Type II, and metal tapes have greater coercivity than ferric tape, meaning it is harder to "coerce" the particles to switch their magnetic poles. That means that it is harder for them to change back, too; so the smaller wavelength prints on tape are more likely to...

Most of the discussion in the "Inventor's Notebook," my explanation, and Alex's posts discuss capacity, not the influence on an incoming signal. Boosting MOL or HF headroom gives the tape more capacity to store, not influence, signals. You are confusing the two. The signal goes into the...

The signal increases only on playback because the flux changes across the head gap create current. At about 2.3 kHz the increase begins to fall off, so the playback EQ--which has decreased the output up to this point--is slowly removed to allow the output to "level off" the response. The end...

Since the MOL at 315 Hz is nearly the same for TDK SA and for BASF Chrome but the dynamic range is slightly superior for the SA, the bias noise for the SA is lower than that for chrome.The only time this was true was when TDK milled their oxide to extremely low morphology to reduce tape hiss...

Correct. I'm not sure what you mean. The bias level is "fixed" only if the user selects a switch on the face of the recorder and does not open the machine to adjust the levels internally. The more sophisticated equipment allowed users to adjust bias by making adjustments on the face of their...

Time-Life cassettes stated "Normal Bias" because so many inexpensive recorder/players had few settings, and the typical setting for playback of most common tapes was labeled "Normal Bias." This is technically incorrect because bias is not used at all for playback, only for recording. The...

Any tape that touches the metal take-up reel is a tape that can sustain damage. Metal reels do not help winds. They only prevent bad winds from ending up on the floor like the Ampex and 3M pancakes.