Rob Gardiner

Does high speed dubbing result in lower quality audio?

Hi everybody,

I'm not sure if this is the right forum. If not, please move it to its proper home.

My office sometimes receives 911 audio cassette tapes that we must copy and provide to attorneys and/or prosecutors. We have a Sony dual cassette deck in the office and it has the capability to perform high speed dubbing, but I've been reluctant to do this, because I'm afraid the sound quality will suffer. The tapes are poor quality to begin with, so any additional quality loss would not be acceptable. Am I worrying for nothing? Will high speed dubs sound just as good as a tape made at normal speed? Many thanks.

Philip Hamm

You are wise to dub at normal speed. It definitely works much better. I don't know how much of a difference it will make on your low quality recordings, but it makes an easily noticable difference on music.

Philip Hamm
Moderator Emeritus

Rob Gardiner

Thanks for the advice, Philip.

I suppose this is the same theory under which "half speed mastered" LPs are supposed to sound superior to regular ones.

Karl_Luph

Yet professional studio analog tape recorders seem to record their master tapes best on high speed machines.

ChrisWiggles

My experience with regular cassette tapes says definitely go normal speed. Record a CD onto tape, and then dub normal and high speed and compare. The difference is obvious. Now, it doesn't seem like you're going for the most scientific approach in terms of needing high fidelity, so it's pretty much your call. I doubt intelligibility would degrade, and it doesn't sound like you're using these for any audio analysis or anything, in which case obviously every little bit of quality is important.

Philip Hamm

Which is in no way related to this subject. Up to a certain point, the higher speed the better the quality with analog tape, as long as the playback speed is the same as the record speed. In this case the record speed is double the playback speed.

Philip Hamm
Moderator Emeritus