Equipment and calibration

The bench

Two transfer rooms, five transports, one converter chain per room, and a logbook that is more important than any of it. Model names are deliberately generic here - what matters for your job is the state of the machine, and that is in the log.

Room 1 - tape and cassette

• Deck 1 - 1/4 in two-speed studio transport, 7 1/2 and 15 ips, full-track and half-track head blocks, rebuilt capstan motor in 2023. Our workhorse; roughly 70 % of jobs.
• Deck 2 - 1/4 in four-speed transport, 1 7/8 to 15 ips, quarter-track block. Used for domestic tapes and anything recorded on a consumer machine.
• Deck 3 - 1/2 in four-track transport, single head block, on a rolling stand because the room is not big enough for it to live out permanently.
• Cassette A / B - two three-head decks with manual azimuth adjustment, one kept strictly for 15/16 ips logging tapes with the motor pulley changed for the purpose.
• Preamplifiers - two discrete transformer-input stages, 60 dB, flat; equalisation is applied after capture, in software, so the curve is a number in a log rather than a switch position somebody forgot.

Room 2 - wire and disc

• Wire transport - rebuilt 24 ips mechanism with a modern tension arm, a replacement head of 0.004 in gap and our own head amplifier. The original drive motor was replaced in 2021 after it marked a client's wire.
• Wire transport 2 - spare, currently apart for a capstan bearing (see the journal).
• Turntable - belt-driven platter with 33 1/3 and 78 rpm, adjustable arm with interchangeable heads, five styli from 2.3 to 3.5 mil, all truncated elliptical.
• Disc preamp - flat moving-magnet stage; no curve applied at capture, same policy as the tape rooms.

Converters and capture

Room 1 converter

two-channel, 24-bit, up to 192 kHz, clocked internally

Room 2 converter

two-channel, 24-bit, up to 192 kHz, used at 192 for wire and disc

Capture

two workstations, no plug-ins loaded on the capture path at all

Monitoring

near-field pair per room plus two sets of closed headphones

Array

two mirrored working disks, 8 TB each, plus an offline disk rotated weekly

Calibration log, recent entries

Quarterly measurements

Once a quarter we measure wow and flutter and third-harmonic distortion on every transport and keep the figures where clients can ask for them. The last round, on 2026-09-07, gave weighted flutter of 0.04 % on Deck 1, 0.07 % on Deck 2 and 0.09 % on the wire transport, with distortion at operating level under 0.6 % everywhere. Deck 2 drifted from 0.05 % in June; the belt is on the list for replacement in November and the figure is in the log so nobody has to remember it.