ndiamone
600 Club - QQ All-Star
When I was in middle school, a neighbor man of ours back in Michigan was working as an engineer at the Air Force base alongside everybody's father. He was a little younger than our fathers and hence unmarried and therefore considerably more well off since all he had to spend his engineers' salary on was himself.
He got an Akai 360D 4-speed reel to reel (plays 1-7/8 all the way to 15 IPS) for a song from one of the guys on base when he came back from Thule, AFB Greenland.
By then, CD-4 was starting to fall off in popularity. As a result, earlier that summer in May, the Base Exchange was blowing out all their old stock, including dozens and dozens of quadraphonic titles, a number of them Japanese CD-4 imports guys had ordered and never picked up, all for a dollar or two apiece and Mel bought the whole lot. I remember him bellyaching later on that summer that it was a shame you couldn't tape the CD-4 onto a reel to reel and be able to demodulate off of that and save the LP as you could for stereo and SQ.
Enter endless cases of still-sealed BASF LP 35 CR tape, the CRO2 reel to reel designed to give 7-1/2 IPS fidelity at 3-3/4 IPS. The local ice-skating rink had been using it in that fashion to get 6 hours of music on one tape, but had recently changed from taping their own music off records to subscribing to a music service which supplied their music digitally in 6-hour blocks using PCM F-1 format on VHS tapes. Therefore, once the rink dumped all their analog gear and tape, Mel got all this expensive tape donated to him along with the seriously worn out leftover music reels.
He had the bright idea that since the CD-4 LP's were recorded at 16 RPM, he could play them back at 16 RPM on his Thorens TD-124 4-speed turntable, record them at 7-1/2 on the Akai with the LPR 35 CR tape, play them back at 15 IPS and demodulate. So he invited me over just about everyday that summer, and we spent the days taping the likes of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Carole King, the Jackson Five, Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin and all kinds of other great records.
But he never got to find out if you could demodulate off that or not, because over Labor Day weekend he was killed in a car wreck. His mom kept everything of his pretty much just as it was, and when she passed away earlier this year, she had her grandson (Mel's nephew) call my Dad back in Michigan who gave him my number out here.
He called, and told me Mel's mom who we all called Nana Reenie (for Irene) had said before she passed that if I wanted all Mel's gear, records and tapes I could have it. So I went home over 4th of July weekend to bring it all back, and it turns out you CAN demodulate CD-4 from an LP transferred at 16, recorded on LP 35 CR tape at 7-1/2 and played back at 15.
So, if all the transfers are as clean as this one, I may use them for discrete 4.0 channel BR-D conversions vs. going back and transferring from scratch off the 5 cases of LP's I got in the deal.
He got an Akai 360D 4-speed reel to reel (plays 1-7/8 all the way to 15 IPS) for a song from one of the guys on base when he came back from Thule, AFB Greenland.
By then, CD-4 was starting to fall off in popularity. As a result, earlier that summer in May, the Base Exchange was blowing out all their old stock, including dozens and dozens of quadraphonic titles, a number of them Japanese CD-4 imports guys had ordered and never picked up, all for a dollar or two apiece and Mel bought the whole lot. I remember him bellyaching later on that summer that it was a shame you couldn't tape the CD-4 onto a reel to reel and be able to demodulate off of that and save the LP as you could for stereo and SQ.
Enter endless cases of still-sealed BASF LP 35 CR tape, the CRO2 reel to reel designed to give 7-1/2 IPS fidelity at 3-3/4 IPS. The local ice-skating rink had been using it in that fashion to get 6 hours of music on one tape, but had recently changed from taping their own music off records to subscribing to a music service which supplied their music digitally in 6-hour blocks using PCM F-1 format on VHS tapes. Therefore, once the rink dumped all their analog gear and tape, Mel got all this expensive tape donated to him along with the seriously worn out leftover music reels.
He had the bright idea that since the CD-4 LP's were recorded at 16 RPM, he could play them back at 16 RPM on his Thorens TD-124 4-speed turntable, record them at 7-1/2 on the Akai with the LPR 35 CR tape, play them back at 15 IPS and demodulate. So he invited me over just about everyday that summer, and we spent the days taping the likes of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Carole King, the Jackson Five, Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin and all kinds of other great records.
But he never got to find out if you could demodulate off that or not, because over Labor Day weekend he was killed in a car wreck. His mom kept everything of his pretty much just as it was, and when she passed away earlier this year, she had her grandson (Mel's nephew) call my Dad back in Michigan who gave him my number out here.
He called, and told me Mel's mom who we all called Nana Reenie (for Irene) had said before she passed that if I wanted all Mel's gear, records and tapes I could have it. So I went home over 4th of July weekend to bring it all back, and it turns out you CAN demodulate CD-4 from an LP transferred at 16, recorded on LP 35 CR tape at 7-1/2 and played back at 15.
So, if all the transfers are as clean as this one, I may use them for discrete 4.0 channel BR-D conversions vs. going back and transferring from scratch off the 5 cases of LP's I got in the deal.