Tape Speeds
In general, the faster the speed the better the reproduction quality. In addition, higher tape speeds spread the signal longitudinally over more tape area, reducing the effects of dropouts that can be audible from the medium. Slower tape speeds conserve tape and are useful in applications where sound quality is not critical.
- 15/16ths of an inch per second (in/s) or 2.38 cm/s: used for very long-duration recordings (e.g. recording a radio station's entire output in case of complaints, aka "logging")
- 1⅞ in/s 4.76 cm/s: usually the slowest domestic speed, best for long duration speech recordings
- 3¾ in/s 9.53 cm/s: common domestic speed, used on most single-speed domestic machines, reasonable quality for speech and off-air radio recordings
- 7½ in/s19.05 cm/s: highest domestic speed, also slowest professional; used by most radio stations for "dubs", copies of commercial announcements; Through the early to mid '90s many stations could not handle 15 IPS.
- 15 in/s (38.1 cm/s): professional music recording and radio programming
- 30 in/s (76.2 cm/s): used where the best possible treble response and lowest noise-floor are demanded, though bass response might suffer.
Speed units of inches per second or in/s are also abbreviated IPS. 3¾ in/s and 7½ in/s are the speeds that were used for (the vast majority of) consumer market releases of commercial recordings on reel-to-reel tape. 3¾ in/s is also the speed used in 8-track cartridges. 1⅞ in/s is also the speed used in Compact cassettes.)
In some early prototype linear video tape recording systems developed in the early 1950s from companies such as Bing Crosby Enterprises, RCA, and the BBC's VERA, the reel speed was extremely high, over 200 in/s, to adequately capture the large amount of image information. The need for a high linear tape speed was made unnecessary with the introduction of the now-obsolete professional Quadruplex system from 1956, which segmented the fields of a television image by recording (and reproducing) several tracks at a high-speed across the width of the tape per field of video by way of a spinning headwheel with 4 separate video heads mounted on its edge (a technique called transverse scanning), allowing for the linear tape speed to be much slower. Transverse scanning was superseded by the later technology of helical scanning, which could record one whole field of video per helically-recorded track, recorded at an angle across the width of the tape.
Read more about this topic: Reel-to-reel Audio Tape Recording
Famous quotes containing the words tape and/or speeds:
“We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)