Featured Narrated Space: Slide & Cassette entertainment

Slides were a common way to share awesome pictures and tell a story. But they are mute... obviously. Unless when combined with a cassette tape that narrates the story through music and voice, signalling when to project the next breathtaking view of space.

For some time now I have been wanting to bring these embodiments of humble 60's to 80's entertainment into the more easily accessible digital domain. It's rather simple: Scan the slides in high resolution, restore them, digitize the cassette with a good quality cassette recorder, restore if needed. Synchronize the two inertly separated mediums in a video editing program and voila!

I've ordered one to try out as a proof-of-concept. To see if it works.

If anybody would be willing to loan theirs, I will put the end product on YouTube and return the material and high quality scans, audio file and video file.

After some weeks of waiting the first set arrived, and here is the result:

 

I use one of these for cassette conversion to mp3, excellent results and no need to use intermediary equipment, just plug in a jump drive and play the cassette - it even auto reverses.
Makes one big mp3, I split up the tracks in Audacity if I need individual track access.

https://www.amazon.ca/Cassette-Digital-Converter-Directly-Computer/dp/B074W2CP5K/

 

I do not believe a cheapo crappy lowest-end tape mechanism and DAC like that can reproduce the quality of a 90's mid-end Denon deck with 3 heads and a closed loop dual capstan drive. And a dedicated USB DAC, which allows me to record 24-bit WAV using audacity.

It would also take away any and all possible recording level adjustments. By the looks of it, neither does it have dolby.

Its fine if you want to digitize a shitty recording for personal use. But I wouldn't use it for my production...

 

Hey just trying to be helpful and if it's just for youtube I imagine results wouldn't be that different, especially for spoken word. Spoken word was often distributed at lower resolution ..remember the 16rpm vinyl records?

 

Suddenly Im 6 years old again sitting in front of the tv with my brother, just glued to the screen . We were absolutely fascinated with the space program ,as was most of the world . Remember how proud we all felt then ?

 

Thank you.

Those kind of transportations into the past is what I do this for.

Your comment means a lot to me.

 

Some old-school astronomy lessons: