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Good flutter test for cassette?

perryinva

perryinva

IS it vintage????
Back inthe 70's, I recall that you could easily hear flutter on cassette decks by playing different piano pieces and hear the longer notes warble. Are there better pieces for listening that REALLY test a decks flutter? Are there such a thing as fluter test tapes? Does anyone lease a wow & flutter machine?
 
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Nakamichi made the T-100 Audio Analyzer and one of it's functions was to test w&f. They are spendy units, and not for the casual use at their cost. You might check your local techs to see if anyone has one. Calibrated test tapes are about the only other method, becuase anything done by ear is subjective.
 
There are wow and flutter tapes available from Sony and Teac, but they aren't much use without a meter. I've seen meters on eBay for $35 ! If you don't have a meter try listening to a solo piano or solo violin. Flutter thickens the tone, while wow will be just plain obvious pitch changing. If you hear it easily, then W+F is over 0.2% RMS. our ears are pretty sensitive!
 
Ferrograph to the rescue

They come up frequently on ebaY, and I would have one now if I could find one at a decent price in Canada or the US. [edit: because shipping is absurd $$ for something like this from Britain to Canada]

But they will give you a very accurate way to test your deck for everything you want.
 
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Aage said:
They come up frequently on ebaY, and I would have one now if I could find one at a decent price in Canada or the US. [edit: because shipping is absurd $$ for something like this from Britain to Canada]

But they will give you a very accurate way to test your deck for everything you want.
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That looks just like my meter. I found mine on Epay (in the US) about two years ago.
 
I have found that the opening piano part of Tchaikovsky's 1st piano concerto is unbearable to my ears on a fluttery deck or TT. Whether the ears are better than instruments, it depends on how trained and sensitive the ear's of a person are - and how well within specs an instrument is.

I know of trained people that can listen to an engine car and without touching anything they can diagnose the condition and faults.
 
SaSi said:
I have found that the opening piano part of Tchaikovsky's 1st piano concerto is unbearable to my ears on a fluttery deck or TT. Whether the ears are better than instruments, it depends on how trained and sensitive the ear's of a person are - and how well within specs an instrument is.

I know of trained people that can listen to an engine car and without touching anything they can diagnose the condition and faults.
Click to expand...
I agree: Piano is extremely revealing for flutter. I have exceptionally flutter sensitive ears, and I can't stand to listen to fluttery machine either. FWIW: Some high organ tones are also super revealing of flutter.

I was actually shocked recently when I tried a piano recording that had always sounded somewhat fluttery to me, on my newly acquire Revox B215s.

Even on a Nak Dragon, which had been my previous reference standard for flutter performance, I could still hear just a hint of flutter on this tape. So I had assumed that this flutter was simply recorded on the tape. But when I tried this tape on the Revox, I simply could not hear any flutter on this recording! I've never experienced this complete lack of flutter out of Cassette before. It was really quite astounding.
 
HMMM, I have Tchaikovsky's 1st on a pre-recorded tape and it sounds fine..I don't have it on CD or vinyl, where I could record and then playback, which would double the flutter. I didn't realize W&F testers were even remotely common...I'll have to keep my eyes open.
 
Goldear beat me to it with using organ tones to reveal wow and flutter on your cassette deck. I've noticed thru various decks flutter can be detected when listening to certain reed stops on a pipe organ...on my own personal tapes that I recorded live of my dad's residence pipe organ, flutter was just barely noticable on both his pro Denon and Tascam 3-head decks while the instrument's Trumpet and Oboe ranks were being played. The least amount of wow and flutter noticable from organ tones was on my Nakamichi decks! I never owned a ReVox or Tandberg, but I have heard others say they are the best in terms of extremely low wow and flutter!
 
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