Tonight: Experiments With Azimuth
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Here's a spectrograph of me playing back my (almost certainly bootleg) SANS LOGIQUE tape while playing with the azimuth dial like a laboratory ape. In an ordinary playback with the azimuth dead-center, that 15.7kHz line would be at a pretty much constant level. But on this side of this tape, you can actually
increase the high-frequency response over dead-center by turning the dial about two "dots" to the right on my CR-70. The parts where it cuts out completely are where I turned the dial pretty much all the way to one side or the other.
Curiously, unlike side A, side B is best with the azimuth centered.
Since most of the audio signal is not very high-frequency at all, the azimuth probably doesn't matter
too much, but I think that's the way to get the best out of this
limited source material.
My other deck (a DR-2) had a "ghost line" at precisely 21kHz, which this new deck doesn't. Not that you can hear that unless you're a bat, but it's interesting anyway.
By the way, the "warty" flywheel doesn't seem to have mattered in the end. What mattered was getting a good belt (Vintage-Electronics was good, WebSpareParts was terrible) and getting the torque
exactly on-point. In fact, I ended up calibrating the torque by playing a W&F tape and twiddling the torque adjuster till I got a minimum on the W&F meter. Once I did that, the torque meter was dead-on with no "jumpiness".
Will be posting some audio files over in the downloads section in a bit, anyway. (EDIT: this is done)