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 (08) 9375 3902

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ProCopy    Po Box 991,

Morley, WA. 6943

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Entries in Audio Cassettes (3)

Wednesday
Jan142015

Digitising audio formats for the future to disc or hard drive

While photographs and videos are important memories to keep for the future, there's also a vast number of important audio recordings on various formats to be saved.

ProCopy digitises and enhances audio from old formats such as 78 inch records including World War 2 message discs, Vinyl LPs, singles and acetates. 

We can also transfer a variety of Reel to Reel tapes including 1/4inch, Half track, 1/4 Track, stereo or mono and audio cassettes.

We'll assess your recordings and advise on the best way to proceed with digitising your collection of audio recordings. We usually recommend digitising to the highest quality possible (CD Audio standard or the equivalent Wav file format) and then providing "down converted" audio as Mp3 or similar for your personal devices or sharing via email or storing in "the cloud". Files can also be transferred to USB flash drives so that you can play them in modern car media players.

Note: many companies and a lot of home based equipment produce direct conversions to Mp3 or other compressed audio formats and you will lose the quality of your original recordings. It takes longer to do the job properly but it does produce the best results.

We are happy to receive records and tapes via post to our PO Box but highly recommend that you send via a trackable service such as Express Post and make sure that the audio tapes, records or reels are securely packaged to prevent possible damage in transit. 

For further details call or email our staff on 08 9375 3902 or email [email protected] 

Sunday
Jun222014

Important audio cassette with a sound problem?

Do you have an old oral history project with some problem audio? 

Have you got a music tape that seems to run at the wrong speed?

Has the tape stopped mid sentence?

Before you throw it away as a lost cause let us try and retrieve your audio and transfer it to another format before it's permanently damaged.

Here's a case study of a recent project with wobbly audio.

Monday
Sep162013

50 years of the Audio Cassette and Ray Dolby

There's been 2 very siginificant events in the last few weeks

1/ It's the 50th anniversary of the Audio Cassette developed by Philips

2/ The passing of a man named Dr Ray Dolby

These 2 events are inextricably linked and one can't be mentioned without the other.

In the early 60s Philips developed a compact cassette based tape format primarily for the recording of speech. (a dictation device). Little did they know at the time ( in fact they failed miserably at securing a reasonable patent for the format that must have cost them billions!)  that it would become a primary carrier of music for over thirty years.

The problem as previously mentioned was that the fidelity of audio cassette was barely enough to record voice well, let alone the extended frequency response needed for music. This prompted a guy by the name of Ray Dolby to look at ways of improving the noise floor and quality of recordings that could be placed on to a 1/8th inch tape running at 1&7/8th inches per second (by comparison modern reel to reels ran at 30 IPS). And in 1965 Dolby Laboratories (visit the Dolby website to learn more) was formed and out of all the research and hard work was the noise reduction system that we know so well as "Dolby B".

There are now literarlly billions of items that use the Dolby technology, from domestic audio players such as cassette and minidiscs to professional applications in cinema and recording studios. 

Dr Ray Dolby truly changed our audio and video world. Here's a fantastic tribute to the man

Remembering Ray Dolby from Dolby Laboratories on Vimeo.

If you need to transfer old audio cassettes, reel to reels or video tapes to digital formats contact us through the form below

 


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