he may not be a beginner, but it seems he is getting everything the wrong way, sorry.
give a watch at this video... you might have the patience of watching it fully, I didn't!
Point is that I watched the first 3-4 minutes and spotted so many wrong information that I stopped because I was literally feeling bad.
then I jumped at random at about 7 minutes and, again, at about 9 minutes and spotted more wrong stuff.
IMO, the guy is totally hopeless but that's not a problem in itself... it becomes a problem when he spreads misinformation around the net, though.
will show you the main mistakes i spotted in the few minutes of this video I watched...
at about 0:47 , he says he lightly lapped the heads which didn't have significant wear... well, even from that low resolution and not too close view of the heads, I can easily spot some wear groove at that piece of metal bar between REC and PB heads and if you're going to lap the heads that bit of groove will go away together with the groove on the heads themselves... then I suspect there is still a wear groove on the heads but the picture is not clear enough to know it.... anyways, my confidence in his expertize is just going to be close to zero.
To get a better idea of what I mean, give a look at this post, where you can see close-up pics of a head before, during and after the lapping process (it was me to explain AlexSE how to do that, btw)...
As you can see, together with the wear groove on both REC and PB heads, also that bit of wear groove at that piece of metal bar in the middle of the two heads has gone away.
https://forums.phxaudiotape.com/threads/head-groove-o-mania.10288/page-3#post-307966
at about 1:14 , he pushes the REC button and the video is talking about tweaking the PLAY response... but, is he joking?
This is a TOTALLY WRONG way of looking at this kind of problem and, then, everything else is influenced by this rookie mistake.
I mean... playback is playback and recording is recording, period.... this is the ABC of decks and magnetic recording in general.
In fact, on any decks, you have to first evaluate and make sure the playback side ALONE is OK and it must be evaluated in itself, without pushing that REC button.
Of course, to evaluate the playback response, you need to own some proper/professional/lab-grade/reliable playback frequency response calibration tape which is a tape with some kind of test tones in it... that tape would be your actual reference and you need to simply PLAY it and then see if the playback side of the deck is OK or not.
After the playback side is OK, you can finally take one or more blank tapes and start recording... but, this time, you will be evaluating only the recording side, not the playback!
The recording side needs to be made after you have just got the PB right, simply because you will still be evaluating the recording through the playback of the same deck which will be the reference to rely on while checking the recording, then if the playback (evaluated alone) isn't just OK, you cannot say anything about the recording.
BUT, what the guy is doing by evaluating the playback while recording onto a tape is just the worst of the worst mistakes I may think about.
That's because he is mixing (well, he is messing really!) playback and recording, judging as a playback problem what it might easily be due to wrong recording calibration or maybe also a tape which is not flat on that deck anyway.
That's just like driving a car while being totally blind: you are still "driving" but you simply don't know where you started from and when you are going to or if you are going off road or crashing against another car, a tree or a wall.
Don't know if you are getting what I mean.... but this is a so bad mistake that, even if the guy isn't a beginner, he would make better to forget everything he think he learnt and restart from scratch the right way... a true beginner is more likely to make a good work than a trained guy who was trained the wrong way.
at about 2 minutes in the video, I can finally see his frequency analyzer... well, the division at the y-axis is 10dB... not that much accurate!
with such a large division, curves will look more flat, then they are more beautiful to see...
while I am evaluating frequency responses, I usually keep the y-axis division to only 1dB or 2dB at max... this magnifies the "errors" so much that also a nice frequency response will not look perfectly flat, but I am not interested in curves which are nice to see... I am interested in seeing things with more accuracy.
if that frequency spectrum analyzer isn't able to zoom-in the y-axis division up to 1dB or 2dB then it means that software is basicly a toy.
(I am using another software, though)
then, after 2 minutes he starts making a few speculations, drawing conclusions, etc... all pointless stuff... so, at about 3:40 i simply stopped because I had just enough of it.
but... jumping directly at about 7 minutes, i see the guy tweaking the response (most likely he is tweaking the REC parameters, since he is still recording) and he does complain about a boost a mid-hi frequencies... well, there are so many tapes which, on most decks, do show some mid-hi boost... so what?
last, I jumped at about 9 to 9:20 in the video, hearing the guy who thinks he can be better than the Sony or Nakamichi engineers, in fact he is going to correct the playback EQ amp (and, don't forget he stated the playback is wrong by RECORDING!) by putting 1000pF capacitor as a load at the playback head or that he did put such a capacitor value on a Dragon deck because, evidently, he thinks the Nakamichi engineers had got it wrong and he can correct them.... but, hey, 1000pF for that kind of purpose is a WHOLE LOT of capacitance, none of the PB heads out there will need that much loading capacitance! Then he is totally ruining some, otherwise good, decks!
Sorry if I am so hard towards that guy.... but I just cannot forgive someone who spreads such bad/dangerous misinformation around the net.
It simply makes all the efforts by the true experts, who spent several years in a forum trying to teach the good stuff, a total waste of time.
People are more likely to enjoy learning on a youtube video than by reading a written post in a specialized forum.
But, hey, till now i've never seen the true experts making videos on youtube and this guy isn't an exception but maybe one of the worst ones I've ever seen.
If you are brave enough to watch the whole video (I wasn't) then, please, draw your own conclusions by simply using some common sense... because it's not simply a matter of having any specific knowledge about cassette decks, those mistakes are so bad that you will simply need to use some common sense to realize it.
On a specialized forum, if someone happens to tell/spread a wrong information, a true expert will likely chime in and correct/explain him.
On youtube, there is no quality control whatsoever on the information spreaded around.
Then, please, do yourself a favour... stop going on youtube while hoping to get any good/proper information about cassette decks... there isn't any or, maybe, there is some good stuff mixed with some bad stuff, all within the same video, and you might not be able to distinguish what is good from what is not.
As for myself, I sometimes watch a youtube video about cassettes to simply have a good laugh on it but, hey, in the end such videos make me really sick, because I just can't do anything to correct or stop the bad misinformation from being spreaded around.
Cheers,
Vince.
