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azimuth adjusting

orangeorange
edited September 2011 in Hardware
um, sorry for these newb questions..

I never adjusted the azimuth for ZX, and it seems to be quite important.

Do recording and playing heads have independent azimuths to adjust?
What software is recommended to use for adjusting? I presume some original game tape should be used as 'reference'?
Post edited by orange on

Comments

  • xbomberxbomber
    edited September 2011
    There are others a lot more knowledgable than me but personally I got best results by cleaning heads and pinch wheel with alcohol before touching it. if issues remain then a small cross head screwdriver and tiny turns whilst listening to output on a headphones. you're listening for maximum crisp sound high in treble with no bass or distortion. good luck.
  • The_BertThe_Bert
    edited September 2011
    Hi orange.

    To the best of my knowledge, only a very few, ultra-high-end stereo cassette decks had separate record and playback heads, with the norm being a combined rec/play head. And even in those rare cases, i believe the heads were actually mounted in a single unit, no wider than the "regular" heads, a condition which was necessitated by the very limited space available in the cassette body.
    As for your idea of using a commercial tape as reference, while it is theoretically sound, in practice it falls somewhat short of the desired goal, because various publishers would use different tape duplicating services, so that even if tapes form one duplicater would be more or less uniform with regards to azimuth, there would be no guarantee that tapes form another service would have the same settings.
    The issue would then be further muddled by the fact that the duplicating machines used, being essentially mechanical devices, would change ever so slightly over time, and would thus need adjustment from time to time.

    So, as xbomber suggests, your best line of defense is therefore to keep the heads and the pinch roller/capstan clean, and, if your cassette player has a tone control, turn it all the way up, so that all the high frequency content is left intact; that is in fact very important, because the tape signals are essentially square wave pulses, and the Speccy relies on good sharp edges of the signal in order to detect it correctly.

    I hope this helps,
    Cheers, Berty :smile:

    P.S. Never be afraid to ask, there are no dumb questions, only dumb answers, and if you don't ask, you won't learn :wink:
    Author of BertoMenus, soon to become BertoBASIC +3 ;)
    Feel free to help yourself to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 Manual.pdf
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