Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

yeah, it's the tape head reading the next layer of the tape through the current layer (because tape is coiled around a dowel)

or however you'd say that, wound, words are hard

okay...
excuse my persistence, and ty for the answer, but i'm having a hard time understanding how that tranlates to me being able to hear it on john coltrane recordings when i listen on spotify.

the masters everything comes from are tapes right

^^

so wait... that "pre-echo" is in the master too? like if i was listening to the actual master tape, it would be there too?

that blows my mind in highly cosmic, existential ways but i'm weird. ty everyone for answering. would love any deepdives into the topic if you know any.

weird shit, man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-echo

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/pre-echo-present-on-lp.229120/

sleeve according to wikipedia at least preecho refers to digital compression artifacts. the tape phenomenon is “print-through” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print-through

thank you!

Digital tapes can also be affected by contact print effects in a phenomenon known as "bit-shift" when upper or lower layers of tape cause a middle layer to alter the pulses recorded to represent binary information.

/\freaking me out.

^^ one of many reasons why Albini hated DAT iirc #onethread

i am genuinely unsettled by it. in a purely wordless emotional way that i can only compare to the feeling experienced by the phrase "uncanny valley." but it's an entirely different vibe because it's some real ghost in the machine shit.

tyvm for those links btw

yeah this is a total rabbit hole

DuPont[3] in conjunction with Otari[4] invented a form of thermal magnetic duplication ("TMD") by which a high-coercivity metal mother master tape was brought into direct contact with a chromium dioxide copy (slave) tape. The coercivity of the mother tape is higher than that of the copy tape, so when the copy tape is heated and brought into contact with the mother tape, the copy tape gets a mirror image of the signal on the mother tape without the mother tape losing its signal. The recording on the mother tape was a mirror image of a valid video signal. Immediately before the copy tape came into contact with the mother tape, a focused laser beam heated it to its Curie point at which its value of coercivity dropped to very low values so that it picked up a near perfect copy of the mother tape as it cooled.[5][6] The mother tape was made using a special reel to reel video tape recorder called a mirror master recorder[7] and was held inside the machine in an endless loop. This system could achieve speeds of up to 300 times playback speed in NTSC VHS SP mode, 900 times in VHS EP mode and 428 times in PAL/SECAM tapes.[8]

DAT tape always struck me as a "worst of both worlds" idea

DAT was a godsend to concert tapers, so I can't disparage it - it totally had its uses.