brent@itm.UUCP (Brent) (03/28/84)
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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)