[Coco] High(Er) speed cassette loading.

[Allen Huffman]

> On Dec 30, 2020, at 8:20 PM, David Ladd <davidwladd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Sadly 4X speed speed the load time I was never able to get to work on tape
> itself.  Only 2X as most of the tapes I had didn't seem to handle 4X the
> data rate lol.

After watching AC’s YouTube video, I’m quite impressed with the improvements that could have been done on tape loading back then.

As to quality, I do not know how good the audio was on Radio Shack computer cassettes, but I know there was a huge difference in some cheap 90 minute tape versus a high quality 30 minute Maxell or whatever.  I spent a few years at a sing-along recording studio in a mall and we bought decent quality short tapes in bulk.  But for the multitrack studio side, they would always buy Maxells and such for mixing down for the customer.

I expect a higher quality tape would help a lot.  The rest is signal loss going through the cassette deck. I wonder how much difference the record/playback heads were and if that mattered a lot. I expect it would, some.

Maybe a good quality Maxell on a good quality audio deck would do it no problem?

		— A