Greaseweazle

A nice benefit of capturing the raw waveforms and post-processing them is that you can do all sorts of very complex processing. If the media are nice and clean then simple processing is sufficient. If they are badly damaged, you may need more. If you do the processing in real time you may not know what all is needed. But if you do post-processing, you can add to the algorithms after data capture has been done, if what you have so far isn't yet good enough. I can imagine techniques like digital filtering, adaptive filters, maximum likelihood decoders, etc. In recovering data from tapes, with multiple tracks, people have often done this same sort of thing, full high bandwidth analog signal capture. You don't even need to know at the time what the data format is. If you think you know but you don't have it quite right, no matter, you just change the software and run another pass through the captured waveforms. No need to run the (possibly fragile) media through the machine again. paul