Digital tapes can also be affected by contact print effects in a phenomenon known as "bit-shift" when upper or lower layers of tape cause a middle layer to alter the pulses recorded to represent binary information.
/\freaking me out.
― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:49 (two weeks ago) link
^^ one of many reasons why Albini hated DAT iirc #onethread
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:50 (two weeks ago) link
i am genuinely unsettled by it. in a purely wordless emotional way that i can only compare to the feeling experienced by the phrase "uncanny valley." but it's an entirely different vibe because it's some real ghost in the machine shit.
― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Sunday, 12 May 2024 00:04 (two weeks ago) link
tyvm for those links btw
yeah this is a total rabbit hole
DuPont[3] in conjunction with Otari[4] invented a form of thermal magnetic duplication ("TMD") by which a high-coercivity metal mother master tape was brought into direct contact with a chromium dioxide copy (slave) tape. The coercivity of the mother tape is higher than that of the copy tape, so when the copy tape is heated and brought into contact with the mother tape, the copy tape gets a mirror image of the signal on the mother tape without the mother tape losing its signal. The recording on the mother tape was a mirror image of a valid video signal. Immediately before the copy tape came into contact with the mother tape, a focused laser beam heated it to its Curie point at which its value of coercivity dropped to very low values so that it picked up a near perfect copy of the mother tape as it cooled.[5][6] The mother tape was made using a special reel to reel video tape recorder called a mirror master recorder[7] and was held inside the machine in an endless loop. This system could achieve speeds of up to 300 times playback speed in NTSC VHS SP mode, 900 times in VHS EP mode and 428 times in PAL/SECAM tapes.[8]
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Sunday, 12 May 2024 00:11 (two weeks ago) link
DAT tape always struck me as a "worst of both worlds" idea
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, 12 May 2024 00:13 (two weeks ago) link
DAT was a godsend to concert tapers, so I can't disparage it - it totally had its uses.
― birdistheword, Sunday, 12 May 2024 02:31 (two weeks ago) link