Recent Finds & Thoughts

< copying them onto a correctly aligned machine would be the first thing t < do to remove such hassles in the future :-). I still don't see how < incorrect azimuth can be used as a copy protection system. It can't. People were likely adjusting them to try and get reliability in loading and assumeing that was the copy protection. Audio tape is as difficult to copy protect as a vinyl recording, you can't effectively. Commercial casettes tend to have lower levels as the dup machines try not to saturate the tape as that would introduce distortion to music, also most were design for stereo (narower head). Most cassette recorders use a mono head (wider) so they pack up less and also when the record they write a wider path meaning they recover more on play back. Stereo tapes tend to play at lower levels and have poorer response on mono decks because of the head with differences. The only way to copy protect and audio tape is not try or make it so it only works on a given machine. Audio cassettes and computers stopped being company around or before '85 and I was there and never saw "copy" protection. I did see a lot of off speed, poorly recorded, tape with horrid print through, dropouts from poor tape (some you could see through!) and other recording errors that would never be noticed if it were music. Actually the best protections was each vendor had a different tape standard for format, data rate and encoding method. None of that was deliberate, most was simply implementation artifacts. The best being L1 trs80 used a slower rate than LIIs on the same exact hardware. Allison