brent@itm.UUCP (Brent) (03/28/84)
. Greetings! I offered some time ago to say something about cassette tapes. I got favorable response to this, unfortunately, work got hectic along about that time and, well you know how it goes. Anyway part 1: The cassette community is a fairly tight-knit group. There are only a handful of raw material and equipment manufacturers, and everyone knows everyone else. I hope to convey some of this sense of community in these articles. There are two methods of duplicating cassette tapes: in-cassette and loop-bin. The first is what it sounds like. You put 60 minutes of tape in a cassette and record on it. The second way is to record the program over and over on large hubs (10,000 feet) of tape and them wind the pre- recorded tape into the shell. In-cassette is used for short runs (say less than 200 copied) and loop-bin for longer production runs. The reason it's called loop-bin is that the master tape is spliced head-to-tail to form a long loop of tape which gets run past a playback head to produce the signal that gets laid down on the cassette tape. This loop of tape gets laid back-and-forth on itself in between two parallel sheets of glass 1/4" (or whateve tape width) apart. This is a "bin", usually about 2' X 3'. I'll start next time about in-cassette duplication, telling about a company that makes tape heads that *never* wear out. -- Brent Laminack (akgua!itm!brent)