The way most people listen to music has changed. “You hear music when you’re in the coffee shop, in the car, in the gym, just walking down the street sometimes, we hear it everywhere,” says Scott Hagen, CEO of Victrola. “In every store, we go into we hear it, and we’re consuming more music than ever before, but not in the same way. The ability to stop and sit and listen to an album from beginning to end, that’s something that always has been and always will be relevant.”
At some point a band, songwriter or home recordist may wish to have cassette duplication made of their songs. These days record companies and publishers prefer cassette, but broadcast radio stations still prefer ¼" reel-to-reel tapes or disc (if your songs are to be played on the air), as the quality is that much better. There are three methods of cassette duplicating available, which are Loop-Bin, High Speed and Real Time.
Loop-Bin
Loop-Bin is a high speed form of duplicating where a 1" or ½" master tape is first made from your ¼" master tape. It is then put on a machine which runs at 32 or 64 times normal speed along with slave units which copy reels of cassette tape. The cassette tape is then fed into empty cassette shells; this method is used for producing anything from 500 to 100,000 copies and is mostly used by independent and major record companies.
High Speed
A master cassette or ¼" reel is run at 8 or 16 times its normal speed along with slave cassette units. These slave units copy both sides simultaneously in stereo or mono and there can be one slave unit copying one cassette, or many slaves copying many cassettes at once. High Speed duplicating can cater for short runs (100+) to runs of thousands.
Real Time
A ¼" reel or cassette master is played at normal speed (which could be 15ips or 7½ips for reels or 1⅞ips if it's a cassette). A bank of 5 to 50 cassette decks all run together to copy at normal speed. Generally, real time duplication caters mainly for runs of 10 to around 1000.
Noise Reduction
Most cassette duplicators can encode your cassettes with Dolby B and some can encode with Dolby C noise reduction. However, if you use a high speed duplicator and you want Dolby on your copies, then make sure your master cassette is recorded initially with Dolby on it. You should then be able to have the copies reproduced with Dolby. High Speed or Real Time duplicating are most likely to suit the home recordist, band, songwriter or small label.
Your Master Tape
This should be ¼" reel-to-reel running at 15ips or 7½ips stereo half track or quarter track. You can use cassette masters (from the studio), but they are not as good quality as reel-to-reel. Do remember also, that if your songs are not in the right running order, then a Duplicating Suite can re-edit the tape, but there may be an additional charge. If you choose the Loop-Bin or High Speed methods be prepared for a charge for making their copy master which is necessary for each of these processes.
Tape Types
When you telephone or go to see a Duplicator ask what tape he uses; for example Ferric, Chrome or Metal, and also, find out what brand it is. A named brand like Agfa, BASF, TDK or Maxell are all pretty much a safe bet. If he used a name you do not know, then listen to a copy, preferably of your master, and compare the quality with other tape brands. You may decide to use your own bought tapes instead of those supplied by the duplicators, in which case there will be a charge per hour to copy onto your own tape, which can be anywhere from £5.00 to £10.00 per hour plus VAT.
Because the CD replication involves quite a bit of setup it’s usually done for larger runs.
Most manufacturers do it on orders of a thousand or more. We replicate CDs in quantities as low as 300.
However, what do you do if you need less than three hundred discs?
