How to Monitor Signals Over a Tape Deck

Video Transcript

On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Kurt Glaser, Chief Engineer at KGB Studios Seattle, continuing on our sessions with how to use a 2-track reel to reel tape recorder. In this session, we're going to be talking about what an audiophile or an audio engineer would actually use to monitor the signals that's coming in to the tape deck over here. One of the first things I look at are these great set of headphones. I love AKG. They're a great brand. They're fairly pricey, but one, they have a very, very secure ear, complete ear cover, so your ears are completely covered. That's the first thing. The second thing, of course, is these quarter inch. Professional audiophiles in the old days and the analog world used these larger quarter inch, they're called quarter inch. And this is stereo, as you can tell, if you can see it, there's a separator between the front and the packed tip on these connectors. This is a quarter inch stereo, male plug for headphones. So these are larger ones. I use these on the studio all the time. They're a great set of headphones. As a precautionary though, if I'm recording live music, I like lightweight because I want to be able to monitor and have some comfort. This has a nice comfortable head strap right in here. Again, it's a quarter inch male plug. But these actually a little bit lighter weight and these are very, very cushiony. They actually cancel out the noise too. And they're, obviously a lot cheaper than the AKG's. The third piece, if I'm really in a pinch for cabling, I want these Sennheiser and these are just fantastic. They're the HDR45s. As you can see, there's no wires, there's no wires at all. They're powered by a little small battery here. The audio quality is astonishingly good. And the distance, I've gotten up to 300 feet separation with these. These are great if you're recording movies on movie sets. If you're doing on set location work, as well as if you're recording live bands and you don't want to be encumbered by any audio cables. These are a great set, I really recommend them. Again, fairly pricey, but you can't beat Sennheiser. Great brand in that sense. Now the other thing is, if in the studio itself, musicians don't want to be encumbered with a huge headphone thing like this. So what they typically, what I like to do in the studio, is I like to give the musicians a lot smaller headphone. And this headphone jack, this is actually a really small, very comfortable, very easy to hear, and it's just great sound quality. Very lightweight and that's the name of the game on that. So that's the headphone and the headphone jacks. What I use typically are the quarter inch male and that covers kind of the whole gauntlet of headphone monitoring. Join us next time when we continue with more connectors on how to use a reel to reel recorder.

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