[svlug] Re: recording stuff off the air

[dfox@belvdere.vip.best.com]

> Perception is more important than reality. VCR technology utilizes analog
> tape. From a signal processing perspective, it is simply impossible for
> analog tape to record at near CD quality sound. It is a simple fact of

But is it necessary to be able to do so? I think with an analog VCR you
can come rather close, but even a digital recording medium (for instance
DAT or a digital VCR) can only digitally approximate the signal that
comes in. In other words, you can create "bad" recordings that are
CD-quality too. For instance, people buy digital camcorders with not-
very high-quality microphones. They might be recording digitally, but
"CD quality" is really misleading. Sure, it may be recording at 44.1K
16-bit samples per second, but that's not really the point.

The subject indicates recording stuff off the air (I assume FM). In this
case you're recording an analog signal. Even if it is recorded digitally,
it's still an analog signal -- at least originally. Furthermore, FM
attenuates at 15K, which means the largest sample rate you'd have to
record would be 30K samples per second. An analog VCR should be able
to record the analog equivalent of this and still "keep up", although
we're talking apples and oranges somewhat. (In other words, to get a
'fidelity' FM recording you need to be able to pass 30k states/second
past the recording head. I don't have hard data, but I've done some
recording of off the air stuff on VCR, and for my money, it's the 
cheapest quality way to go. It should be better than cassettes, or
maybe even reel-to-reel, and the cost to record is cheap compared to
other methods. And it's convenient to be able to record up to 6 hours
on a tape.

And lots of times you don't need CD quality either. For instance, I have
started collecting old time radio shows in MP3 format. I can pack quite
a few of these on a CD-ROM, both because of MP3 itself and the fact that
I (or the original MP3er) don't have to record nearly at CD-quality
sampling rate to get decent output.


>   Karen Shaeffer
>   Neuralscape; (831) 426-8547
>   shaeffer at neuralscape.com  http://www.neuralscape.com
> -------------------------------------------------------
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David E. Fox                 Tax              Thanks for letting me
dfox at belvdere.vip.best.com   the              change magnetic patterns
root at belvedere.sbay.org      churches         on your hard disk.
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