Cassette Duplication Caveats

We figure that in the past five years we've duplicated over 50,000 cassettes. And not a week goes by where we don't have someone who brings a self-produced tape for a dub job and is surprised at the difference between the master and the copy. Sometimes it just doesn't sound the same. And yet if you copy a Radiohead tape on this system the copies come out fine. So what gives?

It is frustrating to put together a tape and not have the copies come out how you want. You put your soul into that tape and all you want is for people to hear it the way you did. I used to do masters for actual record cutting (remember vinyl?) and the differences between the tape we sent and the result on the record could be horrendous. I would call the mastering engineer and their answer was always the same. "Well, make your master more record-friendly." What? "Yeah, you're using too much EQ and your highs and lows are really all over the place."

In fifteen years of talking to mastering houses and engineers, I've found that there are a few pitfalls to avoid in cassette premastering. Here are a few things to avoid -

Accumulated EQ problems - Remember that EQ = Phase Shift. If you have a tape that has been through several stages of EQ, either on the tracks or the mix, it may be on the verge of collapsing or exploding under its own phase problems. It comes disguised as too many highs or boomy lows or "mid-rangey" but these tapes are all bombs when they go through a cassette deck. A good mix can avoid these problems in the recording stage by paying attention to mike placement, levels and balance. I recently mastered the new compilation CD and heard one song from another studio (you don't think I'd let that one slip by, did you) that had no mids at all. I'm not kidding, it was all thud and zip. The problem with that tape may have been Bad Monitors.

Bad Monitors - A mix is the inverse result of monitor accuracy. If your monitors are all lows then your master tape will not have any lows. So any other problems will show up in the same way. That tape with no midrange was undoubtedly the child of a really honky monitor setup. At Surreal we use Westlake monitors on the wall for the big stuff, and Klipsch for the nearfield stuff. Nearrfield you need to assume that the lows you heard on the wall are still there. And you need as flat a monitor as possible. I've been through a dozen different monitors and many lie and most suck. Yamaha NS10s do both. They don't go low enough to hear any fundamentals from bass instruments and the tweeters have a distracting bite. Thousands of studios bought those things and at some point all of them ended up with Kleenex over the tweeters to shut them up.

Listening Too Loud - Remember the "loudness switch" on old stereos? It did make things seem louder. If you turn up the volume the lows and highs will seem more apparent because of the "Fletcher - Munsen Curve" which is a boring scientific way of saying "Listen quieter and the lows and highs go away". That is the cause of the smile shaped graphic EQ curve on so many PA systems. More lows and highs increase apparent loudness. Our ears are built to hear natural sounds in the 400hz - 5k range. You can hear a voice from across the parking lot, but not a rumble. Don't mix loud all the time.

Magic Boxes - If it's a bad mix, no box built by BBE, APHEX, or DBX will save it. There is a giant market catering to the unsuspecting few that think that there is just one last thing to push that mix through and make it sound clearer. I've never heard one. I've heard more damage than good from these Pandora's boxes.

So it always gets back to good mixes. I like to draw analogies to film. You are the photographer of the sound. And as the cameraman you have to abstract to the result. How does a photographer know how a black and white photo will look when looking at the scene in color? You need to look at it all with a certain eye (or ear) for what you are really doing. Realize that, like photographs, the final mix should be able to be enlarged or reduced without losing the integrity of the sound.