Yes, if people want to pursue this discussion, we could have a separate Body Art/Body Piercing thread or something along those lines.

I assure you I wasn't taking sides. I have nothing against Ian or his post at all, but as I said, I thought it was the wrong place.

I'm happy that Antheil has more wit, passion and insight than you will ever find in The Daily Mail.

congrats

Do you have variable settings for the cut-off point, eru? Sounds as if you're taking too much away: It's better to make several light passes rather than one heavy one, if you can.

Don't have a deal of experience with Audacity, but perhaps it's not specialised enough for the job.

Since pre-recorded cassettes were recorded at high speed - typically 8x playback speed - on pretty standard tape stock, most of them were no great shakes to begin with, John. If they were pre-owned, then there's a distinct possibility that they were left in the machine occasionally, left near to televisions or loudspeakers, stretched in fast-winding and generally poorly treated. Most of them only ever started life as mid-fi, and more often than not subsequently deteriorated markedly.

 Virtually all commercial pre-recorded tapes post 1974 were Dolby B encoded, but your problems might still happen even were you to play an individually recorded Dolby C tape made on a another machine. For the system to work accurately, the recording and playback machines need to be working at exactly the same speed, since the operation relies on an exact frequency match, and even a small variation in speed will throw the calibration out: to make matters worse still, not only the recording and playback machines but the cassettes themselves and the variations in tension that they cause the tape to undergo make it a very hit-and-miss system.

That there were machines that managed to achieve decent results from cassettes is one of the miracles of late C20th design and engineering, but most of them cost considerably more than your Wharfedale deck.