My Newbie Question

[Leviset]

I’m a Pure Mathematician who is rubbish with anything requiring some electronic or practical application, so please excuse my naive question.
I’ve just finished restoring a Sharp PC-1500A with an attached CE-150 Printer/Case.
After scouring the house for my Bush tape cassette to store programs on it, I found it but the tape counter has stopped working.
It crossed my mind that I have 2 working Sony Minidisc Player with 10 new disks.
Could I take my Mic and Ear from the CE-150 into the Sony Minidisc and store and Retrieve my basic programs on the Sony instead of a tape cassette or are we looking at anologue to digital mis-match in storing the generated basic program .wav file?
Thanks
Dennis

[grsbanks]

You can try, it might work.

If it doesn't, though, you won't really know if it's down to the interface or if it's the MD recorder introducing too many compression-related artefacts.

This said, my intuition says that it should work because, after all, the signal output by the interface is nothing more than two alternating frequencies.

Also, you might have issues with the output level of the MD being too low.

As I said, just suck it and see. You won't damage the interface or the MD unit.

[toml_12953]

(01-30-2019 04:45 PM)Leviset Wrote:  I’m a Pure Mathematician who is rubbish with anything requiring some electronic or practical application, so please excuse my naive question.
I’ve just finished restoring a Sharp PC-1500A with an attached CE-150 Printer/Case.
After scouring the house for my Bush tape cassette to store programs on it, I found it but the tape counter has stopped working.
It crossed my mind that I have 2 working Sony Minidisc Player with 10 new disks.
Could I take my Mic and Ear from the CE-150 into the Sony Minidisc and store and Retrieve my basic programs on the Sony instead of a tape cassette or are we looking at anologue to digital mis-match in storing the generated basic program .wav file?
Thanks
Dennis

I use a laptop computer to save/load programs to my Radio Shack PC-2 (same as Sharp PC-1500A) and it works just fine. Since you already have the equipment, it shouldn't cost you anything to try it. You may need to experiment with the volume control. The worst that could happen is that it doesn't work. You could always buy a cheap used cassette recorder on eBay if you need to.

[BobVA]

MD uses a compression algorithm similar to (but different from) MP3 designed to discard information not easily detectable by human hearing. This tends to cause problems with audio-based data formats.

Generally you have to use an uncompressed or lossless format (e.g. .WAV files) to successfully record/play back the old cassette signals from vintage gear on digital media.

But I don't think I've heard of anyone trying MD for this, so who knows? Please let us know if it works!

Bob

PS It might be worth a peek inside your cassette recorder at the tape counter. I'll bet it's just aged/disintegrated drive belt which may be an easy fix.

[Leviset]

Yes - I’ve opened up the tape cassette and can see that the rubber belt to the tape counter is intact and is turning the plastic spindle that it attaches to.
So that seems to indicate something else inside the little plastic box that the spindle disappears into, which has the 3 numeric counter dials inside it but would require a bit more open heart surgery - bearing in mind my opening newbie confession of my practical abilities!! (this is the ex 14 year old Grammar School boy who was banished from the Woodwork Class in 1964, but was fully OK with differential calculus at the same age and was taught by my Grannie to play both Cribbage and ‘5s and 3s’ quite well by the age of 4. The man who bought his wife (now of 50 years last year) a Black & Dekker drill for Christmas, the same wife who has banned me from using any type of glue in the house - but I and still can play pretty decent blues guitar and was in a couple of fairly decent Blues Bands in the 60s & 70s and only retired from doing session guitarist slots last year).
I’ve just remembered I’ve also still got a working 1960s Sony Reel to Reel, a 1970s wood and plastic desktop cassette recorder, Tascam Portastudio ministudio, and a full blown ProTools System down in my basement studio which all have counters on them and the corresponding Mic & Ear sockets, albeit the larger 6.3mm ones or RCA.
I thought I’d also heard it’s possible to ‘play’ the sound made by early computers and record it to tape via a microphone , although getting the correct volume can be tricky.