Talk:Inches per second

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[edit] Microcassettes

I expect some people to do a double take on the claim that the playback speed is not specified, but it's true!

Nor in the case of a microcassette is it implied that the playback speed will be identical to the record speed, far from it. The function of a dictating machine is (or was, it's an obsolete technology) to allow transcription to typed pages by a professional secretary or typist. For this purpose, the quality of the voice was irrelevant, so long as intelligibility was unimpaired. It didn't matter whether the secretary liked or even understood what they were hearing just so long as they typed it accurately. So far as speed was concerned, the ideal was the secretary's maximum accurate typing speed, which could be faster or (possibly more commonly) slower than the speed at which the material was dictated. Continuously variable playback speed was therefore a feature of all the best machines designed for the secretary to use.

Some secretaries got very proficient at typing for particular people using a variable speed playback machine, and would rarely need to stop or rewind a tape. So long as the playback speed wasn't a lot slower than the recording speed (which would have affected intelligibility anyway), the ability to avoid stopping and rewinding was far more important than a high playback speed in determining the overall time a transcription would take. In the days before word processors, typing accuracy was also very important.

Some will I imagine do another double take at the claim that it didn't matter whether the secretary understood what they were typing. But that was my experience! I worked in two technical areas in which I had professional secretarial services (although never my own secretary). In both cases I had the pleasure of working with typists who had an uncanny ability to type accurately things of which they had very little understanding. They quickly learned the vocabulary without needing to know its meaning, and the office could not have functioned without this talent.

So while this is a form of sound reproduction, and the accuracy of this reproduction is as important here as in any other application, the criteria for this accuracy are radically different to those for some other applications. Most notably and obviously they differ to those for recorded music where tempo is important and pitch extremely critical. Andrewa 19:09, 13 August 2005 (UTC)