Tape Head Saturation - Just a quick sanity check...

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Kingston said:
Wow, a quote for the ages. I wouldn't downplay the fact the media itself has very limited capability of carrying the flux. It's the primary source of distortion.
Was that a political statement? Yes, the media is the primary source of distortion!  :p
 
jBam said:
2) How does amplitude work then - ?  I'm assuming like this: the magnetic orientation of emulsion on blank tape is random (or more likely fixed side-to-side by an erase head?? something like that).  Low levels in recording cause a relatively small amount of the emulsion to reorient longitudinally (back and forth, presenting a + / - storage of amplitude), but not all reorient.  Large amplitudes cause more of the emulsion to reorient.  Peak amplitudes effectively makes all of the emulsion to reorient.  Is THAT correct to amplitude?  I'm having trouble understanding tape basics here, but that's what I've come up with!!
This is the magnetic domain theory. It is helpul for understanding how ferromagnetism works at the molecular level, but not much for understanding how much. Macroscopically, the concepts of permittivity, hysteresis, coercivity and remanence are more practical.
 
abbey road d enfer said:
Is it something you made up, or is it actually archeological proof that someone experienced with teh concept?  :)

Definitely made up, as far as I know.

Hopefully, some smiled at the absurdity, but more importantly, someone who knows more about the finer points of magnetics as it would apply here, may get inspired and run with it in a useful direction.

Perhaps a toroid, or some other shape core, can be made of sintered Fe2O3 or with a binder, and then play around with it as a transformer. Do you figure it would need to be gapped? Any results would be interesting.

Gene
 
Gene Pink said:
Perhaps a toroid, or some other shape core, can be made of sintered Fe2O3 or with a binder, and then play around with it as a transformer. Do you figure it would need to be gapped?
Being gapped would reduce considerably the non-linearities, so It may make the effects less audible. I think ultrasonic bias would be utterly necessary, too. Most of the "tape sound" is the result of the magnetic material's non-linearities being countered by bias. Being punctilious, there are other things that should be taken into account, such as head core saturation.
 
Hi all...

Sorry for the slow responses - some great discussion here, and a pretty funny pic from Gene that almost seems to make me keen to experiment in that space haha...

abbey road d enfer said:
This is the magnetic domain theory. It is helpul for understanding how ferromagnetism works at the molecular level, but not much for understanding how much. Macroscopically, the concepts of permittivity, hysteresis, coercivity and remanence are more practical.

Great tip the Abbey - been reading through these concepts in brief (absolutely getting nailed at work at the moment; hence the slow response!)...

Certainly thinking that a custom style Xformer or similar is starting to make sense, with the material chosen being the most likely way to mimic tape...  OR hey... as the pic suggests... maybe tape itself haha...

Very please with the discussion here all - cheers :)

 
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