Two members, here, are masters at the use of bias-tuning to get the utmost out of ferric tapes. Had they not told me, I would not have known this was even done when I played back their mix tapes.
Shout out to Sep and Vincent, who have plenty of experience in this regard.
Nando.
thanks for the kind words, my friend.
anyways, i don't think i make something too special... i just try to bias the tape nicely.
that said, recorded frequency response isn't exactly my main parameter when biasing a tape.
At first, I try to bias a tape (any kind, not only ferrics) in order to maximize the MOL and the sensitivity at mid-low frequencies and then i plot a REC/PB sweep tone and see how things work regarding frequency response. If it's just OK, then i'll get both flat response and good MOL, otherwise i try and see what i can do.
If the tape, once it's biased to get max MOL and sensitivity at mid-lows, shows some added brightness then i leave it that way (there are quite a few tapes with boosted response on treble and if i raise bias even more to flatten it, then it can happen that the response falls down at extreme treble well before 20khz), if the tape (biased as above) shows falling response then i have to reduce bias a small bit to get good treble but i know i will lose some MOL on the mid-bass, then i'll have to lower recording levels a bit.
but if a deck allows me to also (manually) tune the REC EQ (and very few decks can do it, at least manually) then i can get both high MOL and flat response together, and, on decks with fixed REC EQ settings (the majority of them), such ideal situation happens with those tape models which just happen to match the (fixed) REC EQ setting of a given deck... so, certain tapes will work better on some decks than on others, and having more decks to choose is a nice way to exploit the various models of tapes out there by simply selecting the right deck(s) for a given tape.
Of course, to check all of the above, it's needed to make measurements on more tapes and decks... but also by tweaking things by ears will show you when a tape works particularly good (or bad) on a given deck.
