If you want to understand the true beauty of these machines, I recommend listening to this wonderful mix by the great Kerri Chandler played on four reel-to-reel machines https://youtu.be/YC7Mw8RjlXM
I think house is might be the one genre I genuinely don't get at all. Playing this mix just cemented this feeling to me. I can hear it's smooth and mellow, but it's also just the most boring thing ever. If I go out to dance and a DJ is playing this I go find a different place. As I'm typing this comment the music only just got interesting, and I'm at 8:15, like why.. And I just know that he's just going to ruin it by making the interesting part boring by stretching it for the next 4 minutes. I've got a few friends in my old crew that still do house dance, and I can get with it for a while, but eventually the boringness just gets to me and I need something to either pop or break.
I really appreciate the skill of the person operating the machine but it doesn't sound particularly different from any random CD to me. I guess it's an interesting constraint for the DJ though, you can't swap the tape in and out without rewinding it first, you can seek randomly like on a vinyl. It's a cool art performance but the resulting audio on its own is fairly mundane as far as I can tell. It sounds a bit compressed but that's fairly common for that type of music so it's hard to judge if it's a constraint of the hardware or an artistic choice.
I think when people think of "reel-to-reel" tape, they're probably imagining the sort of upright desktop models that were extremely popular among hobbyists in the 50s and 60s.
But studio-grade tape machines were absolute engineering marvels. They could weigh as much as a thousand pounds, and had to be maintained and calibrated by highly-skilled technicians.
There were a thousand factors with tape (tape formula, humidity, azimuth, asperity, the fact that it's a Tuesday), but having an even speed was the main thing. The big names in analog tape -- Ampex, Studer, MCI -- were really all about creating extremely precise motors. IPS (inches per second) was the critical number, and the engineers who worked on that problem are legends. Honestly, these incredible gadgets belong next to Rolleiflex cameras and Lamborghini clutches in the history of mechanical engineering.
I used to calibrate Studors when I got my first reel (ha) internship out of college. Fascinating machines, I loved being in a small cohort of self-taught individuals who could work on decades old technology.
Sometimes we would lack documentation on a particular model, or part we needed to repair, but I remember my mentor's words that follow me through industries and jobs to this day;
"if a human designed and built it, a human can understand and repair it".
There are a surprisingly large number of electronic and media devices that can be fixed through baking (1 would be surprising). I've heard this can work with video cards and motherboards as well I wonder if HN knows of any other such devices.
Not baking, but I've recovered data from spinning hard drives after freezing them, on a couple of occasions. The last one required keeping it in a cooler full of ice, because the data transfer was so slow that it would stop once thawed.
Xbox 360's that had a red ring of death problem could sometimes be solved by baking them or at least applying some heat via a heat gun (in the right place).
I got an extra 2 years out of mine before it died doing this
Yeah, it was a classic characteristic of the G84 series of GPUs from Nvidia (8400M GS in the XPS M1330 I owned was one). The Ball-Grid Array solder would crack in a heat/cold cycle and so you'd effectively get an open circuit. By baking it, the solder would reflow and close the circuit again.
When my mother's smartphone wouldn't boot anymore, I took it apart and put the main board in the oven for a while. It worked perfectly fine again for a week or so. I repeated the procedure a few times, until her new one arrived.
No idea why it works though, or why it only lasts a week.
I wouldn’t say it’s surprising, ultimately it’s just a controlled thermal cycling to repair some physical defect. It’s counterintuitive because there is a large mythos around “heat is always bad” for electronics and delicate items.
With the gpu or motherboard something has warped out of shape or a solder joint has become defective. Akin to heating up the top of a jar with a stuck lid.
Dave Lee/Joey Negro has been rescuing the master tapes of classic songs for years, and after the legal rights hunt is done baking the tapes before digitization, Genius respectful remixer IMO. Also love Chandler but much as I like his incredible tape deck mixing didn't enjoy his set that much
My first technology job was for a computer store that did the same thing to get an old hard drive to spin up so they could copy the files off to a new drive.
I highly doubt that's the same mechanism though, this has to do with the carrier of the tape getting stuck, something harddrives do not have a problem with. Typically with old harddrives that haven't run for years it is enough to put a drop of oil on the spindle bearing and then to spin it up manually before engaging the motor (which may otherwise burn out trying to unstick the bearing).
Old hard drives with stuck spindle motors can be temporarily resurrected, with some risk and low degree of success, by freezing them for 12 hours and then plugging them quickly into a test bench computer to attempt data extraction.
They mentioned future experiments with other magnetic media like VHS tapes and compact cassette but what about old floppy discs? I have a friend with a bunch of old 5.25 floppy discs that he hasn't thrown away but they also can't be read. Would this approach have a chance to rejuvenate an old bad floppy?
I know of another technique that requires special hardware for Apple II, it's a floppy read mechanism that can read / re-read the floppy at the 'flux' level and build up a statistical profile which often is correct about the hard to read areas. ref (https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/episode-6-applesauce-with-j...)
I just finished old reel-to-reel tape digitizing of family audio files going back to 1953. Luckily they were stored in a cool dry place. I had to cannibalize 2 players to get one working.
[+] [-] webkike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gravityloss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sramsay|5 years ago|reply
But studio-grade tape machines were absolute engineering marvels. They could weigh as much as a thousand pounds, and had to be maintained and calibrated by highly-skilled technicians.
There were a thousand factors with tape (tape formula, humidity, azimuth, asperity, the fact that it's a Tuesday), but having an even speed was the main thing. The big names in analog tape -- Ampex, Studer, MCI -- were really all about creating extremely precise motors. IPS (inches per second) was the critical number, and the engineers who worked on that problem are legends. Honestly, these incredible gadgets belong next to Rolleiflex cameras and Lamborghini clutches in the history of mechanical engineering.
[+] [-] palijer|5 years ago|reply
Sometimes we would lack documentation on a particular model, or part we needed to repair, but I remember my mentor's words that follow me through industries and jobs to this day;
"if a human designed and built it, a human can understand and repair it".
[+] [-] bane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdoliner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stronglikedan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyxcharon|5 years ago|reply
I got an extra 2 years out of mine before it died doing this
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmm|5 years ago|reply
No idea why it works though, or why it only lasts a week.
[+] [-] swsieber|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StrangeDoctor|5 years ago|reply
With the gpu or motherboard something has warped out of shape or a solder joint has become defective. Akin to heating up the top of a jar with a stuck lid.
[+] [-] kitotik|5 years ago|reply
You don’t really get a second chance to bake it. The particles just start flying off the tape and leave a nice coating on the heads.
[+] [-] jlarcombe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olivermarks|5 years ago|reply
https://news.traxsource.com/articles/819/remixed-with-love-b...
[+] [-] bdcravens|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitotik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djmips|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djmips|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djmips|5 years ago|reply
https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-c...
[+] [-] jdmoreira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitjak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.wikihow.com/Do-the-Xbox-360-Towel-Trick
[+] [-] atrn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cclark00|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samirsd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sramsay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkanciscan|5 years ago|reply