[QuadList] What Would a Newly Designed Quad VTR Do and Have? Reply by 6/15/2012- (Was Ampex Quad VTR Airflow Requirements)

[Scott Thomas]

You know a lot more about the theory than I, but that's kind of why I figured that a scanner would be needed rather than a stationary head. Even if you could use stationary heads, you would need many, all with different head gaps for the various frequencies.

A single-head scanner might be able to create an image of all of the frequencies and their location on the tape. You can run the linear speed of the tape at anything, but the scanner (head wheel) would run at the optimal speed. 

You would need some powerful software that would look at the physical layout of the tracks and reconstruct, in a sense a virtual demod of the signal. The reconstruction of that image into video sounds like a lot of work. I see it as a way someone a hundred years from now might go about trying to figure out what's on some tape and there are no longer a VTR to play it back on.

A year or so ago I had mentioned to a person famous in the ASIC/FPGA programming world that a Quad machine signal and transport system would be a good project for her. She never wrote back, even though she was soliciting ideas for projects.

Oh well,

Scott Thomas

On Jun 3, 2012, at 8:11 PM, C. Park Seward wrote:

> I have seen laser techniques reading phonograph records but nothing like that for magnetic tape including audio.
> 
> How would you untangle the magnetic response of one head reading multiple scans at the same time? And at what speed? If you ran the machine at 15 ips and tried to read the tracks, wouldn't the frequency of the RF tracks be too low?
> 
> Best,
> Park
> 
> C. Park Seward
> Cell: 818-535-2747
> Home: 541-476-6657
> 2" Quad and 1" "C" transfers
> The Transfer Lab at Video Park
> Visit us: http://www.videopark.com
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 3, 2012, at 4:39 PM, Scott Thomas wrote:
> 
>> I had wondered if a scanning technique would work. They are able to scan wax cylinders and then reconstruct the sound information, why not magnetic tape?
>> 
>> My idea would be a scanner not too unlike the quad acanner. It would need only one head and could work on the tape in a slower than real-time rate.
>> 
>> I think the software to reconstruct an image would probably be a massive challenge and the amount of raw data that would be collected in the scanning process would fill a datacenter, but what do I know. Might be easer to just build a new quad machine. :)
>> 
>> Scott Thomas
>> 
>> 

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