ICKY BLOCK OF RANT TEXT INCOMING
I want to preface this by saying that THIS IS ALL MY OPINION, and absolutely doesn't matter in the long run.
Anyway, this is a light rant on the archiving of the cassettes as far as the consideration of recording levels, dynamic processing, and tape head azimuth. When I was a little younger, the only access I had to any Teddy stories was that old website with the black background and yellow text with the .WAV files. As far as I recall, those didn't sound particularly fantastic which is alright, considering that these may have been the only way many got programmed material for their teddies as well at that time. My main concern is these newer archives. What I notice most is that many of them are "brick walled" (a dynamic processing technique in which audio is compressed to a set dB [volume] limit). This is not the way to go about it, because when trying to play back these tapes, the volume of the program track has the potential to be too loud, which can make Teddy and Grubby's faces go crazy. Turning down the volume to match the programming volume would make the stories too quiet, resulting in a huge headache. The other concern was tape head azimuth, which is far less important. Azimuth, in this context, is the alignment of the playback head to the signals (tracks) on the tape, enabling clear and proper playback. In a lot of these, the azimuth is slightly off, causing it to have a higher noise floor and muffled sound, almost like a veil is over top it.
I run the risk of sounding like a crazy person, but as someone who is obsessive over proper archiving and audio recording/production as a whole, it is a bit of a pet peeve.
-Sabrina
