One of the things I'm going to have to do, is tune the speed of the motors once I've changed belts. I could do things by ear, but I was wondering if there was a reasonable meter around that would show what frequency a known 3000 tape is playing at, in a deck. Anyone have any recommendations please? Obviously I'm trying to balance cost and quality.
I have never tried it but would a guitar tuner work ? You might even be able to get an App for a Smartphone
Good suggestions. I'm nto sure how accurate they'll be. I do have a guitar tuner, but it measures according to accuracy of the individual strings... but saying that, if I found a tape I could trust... at a frequency that happens to be one of the guitar strings... that would work. My problem is getting a tape deck that I know is already calibrated. Hmmm.....
WFGui is what you're looking for! This is a great piece of donation-funded software that will show you the speed accuracy and wow & flutter of your deck when playing back a 3000hz test tape. All you need to do is feed the output of your deck into your PC sound card. Info and a link to download is available here.
Thanks! Great advice. Unfortunately, it's a Windows executable and doesn't seem to have a Jar. I run Linux, so I'm going to have to see if this will work under Wine, or other form of emulation. I did download Spectroid and, although I don't have iOS or Android, I did manage to get it running under the Dalvik that comes with Sailfish... in order words, I used a web site to generate a 3000 Hz reference file and played it back on my computer. The software showed a nice 3000 hz peak which I hope is going to be enough to do the job.