I was making backups of old turbo-tapes to disk and noticed that the quality was very poor on some tapes. I have a LOAD-IT datasette with a signal meter. Problem with it was, that I could turn the knob (head alignment) 45 degrees and still have same two(lousy) bars on the meter. There was a need for something more accurate when adjusting the alignment to get the best signal while reading the tapes.
My solution was to implement an analogue VU-Meter to show the signal strength and a possibility to listen in on the signal to determine if its data or other information(music).
Update 2015-04
Information on how to build a VU-Sette : http://blog.worldofjani.com/?p=1477
Down right, a 22 mm hole is drilled for the (obvious) VU-Meter.
The VU-meter itself is from a batterytester, hence the text 🙂
In action
A quick comparison with FinalTAP on two .tap images. Left tape has been read with “VU-Sette” and right tape with LOAD-IT. I tried several reads with LOAD-IT but the result was pretty much the same. There is nothing wrong with LOAD-IT, as long as you got a good signal on the recorded media.
In my case, “VU-Sette” allowed me to adjust the head more precisely and get out a (much)better read of the tape. For you who are not familiar with FinalTAP, its a tool for examining, cleaning and restoring digitized data cassette tapes (TAP files) for the Commodore 64 computer.