Approach | Advantages | Drawbacks |
Wider tape tracks Higher tape speed |
Better fidelity, lower noise. | Less recording time, any transport issue stands a great chance of ruining the tape beyond all repair. |
Helical Scanning | Extremely high fidelity (as in VHS Hi-Fi systems). Tape runs slowly compared to other systems. (Helical scanning makes the tape appear to be moving at high speed from the perspective of the recording electronics.) | Transport complexity, imprecise editing, time for transport to start up. |
Digital Recording | Extremely high fidelity. Fairly resistant to degradation. | Lack of popularity, potential transport unreliability, limitations of the sampling rate/depth, limitations of the ADC or DAC. Few or no new machines being produced. |
High-Bias Magnetic Tape | Greatly reduced noise floor (and improved signal to noise ratio) as compared to any normal bias tape. Metal (type IV) tape can be nearly silent without need for noise reduction. | Lack of popularity, high cost, generally only compatible with decks that can adjust their biasing and equalization preamplifier circuits to compensate for the differing characteristics of the tape. High-bias tapes can be hard to come by. Type IV tape is no longer made. |
Other Mediums (CD) |
Nearly perfect sound
reproduction, no degradation on repeated playbacks. |
Not as easy to create as a tape
recording. |
Other Mediums (Mini-Disc) |
Almost as convenient as tape,
great editing functions, very good audio quality in most
circumstancs.
No hiss noise. Disc and track titling functions, reusable media,
portable. |
Never caught on, new players are
not being produced and some have reliability issues. Audio data is
compressed on most models using lossy ATRAC compression. |
Computer Recording |
Nearly perfect sound
reproduction, capable of extremely high quality audio capture. Can
record for a very long period of time or from many different inputs
at
once. |
Uncompressed audio takes up a
lot of disk space, and it isn't always convenient or possible to
take a
computer where the sound you wish to record is located. Computers
are
typically not as rugged as magnetic tape formats. |