Just a comment about the pros and cons of using cassette tape vs other media (disc or DAT) in vocal studios.
While there are certainly great technical advantages to using digital audio tape, CD-ROM, CD, minidisc, etc., I think you have to keep one thing in mind: the purpose of the recording device in the vocal teacher's studio is NOT so the vocal teacher can simply capture and retain the recordings made there. It is so the STUDENT can take those recordings home and continue to learn from them between lessons.
Given this, I would suggest that the fidelity of the medium is far less important than the (1) universality; (2) reusability; (3) portability; (4) cheapness of that medium.
You could, of course, canvass all your students and ask them whether they care about whether you use a somewhat more arcane recording medium, like minidisc or DAT, which they will be unlikely to be able to listen to outside of your studio.
But I suspect you'd be far better off just sticking with the most universal of the audio recording media - which is still standard cassette tape. Students can either bring their own blanks (which is how most teachers manage it), or you can provide blanks. With a good microphone, you'll still get very good quality audio. ANd most of all, you will never have to worry about your students not being able to USE the recordings you make in the studio because they don't have a system on which they can play them back.
Yes, of course most people have CD players - but I don't know if you really want to get into the business of requiring your students to bring blank CD-ROM discs to their lessons, and having to spend a few minutes at the start of each lesson figuring outwhere on the disc the blank space begins for appending the new lesson onto the disc after previous lessons recorded there. Unless your intention is to get a CD-RW (vs. CD-ROM or just CD) burner (and whether you want to invest in one that doesn't require a PC to be attached to it for it to operate, i.e., one with a built in computer), you won't be able to reuse the CDs once they are "burned" to the first time. This makes them rather less practical as cheap recording media than good old cassette tapes.
Karen Mercedes http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html *************************************** What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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