[Arny Krueger]

wrote in message
oups.com...

Wow, I never knew that azimuth stability was such a problem with
cassettes.

Its a very major problem, exasperated by the low tape speed.


How do you know how to adjust the azimuth - or how would a device know
what the correct setting is? Is there some fail safe way to tell, or
do you have to use your own ears?

The best way to adjust azimuth is to have a mono test tape, and adjust the
azimuth until tape heads tracking the top and bottom edges of the recorded
track reproduce waves with identical timing.

William's story about tape heads that split one of the tracks on the
cassette is very believable. It turned every track into a mono track by
having two narrow heads that split the track. The narrowness of each head
would hurt its dynamic range, but summing them together to create an
output signal would eliminate that problem.