Here is a recording of my family on Christmas 1981 at my home in Martinez, California. I can’t remember how this was recorded, but most likely I used my Superscope C-104 monaural cassette recorder. For this presentation, the cassette tape was played on my Sony TC-D5M stereo recorder, with Dolby noise reduction switched off, producing left and right monaural sound. The audio was captured into my computer with VSTHost. Normally, I will choose either left or right (not both channels) and create a mono .wav file, if I know the tape is monaural. This tape has quite good audio on both left and right with no audible phasing effects from the TC-D5M (maybe I have a tin ear) so I left the recording in stereo. If you prefer, you can fade down one side for true monaural sound. I did a little editing and level adjustment with Adobe Audition, and then created an Mp3 at 320 Kbps with RazorLame.
As I mentioned previously in the post “Guess What, I’m Still Here!” this recording has my mother trying out a new popcorn popper, specifically a Wear-Ever Popcorn Pumper. Pictured below is the same unit from 1981. It does still work quite well! If you’re lucky, I will try to make a video of the Popcorn Pumper in action.
This is a video I made today on February 20th. 2018, showing the Wear-Ever Popcorn Pumper my mother used in 1981. It still works perfectly today. This post was originally from December 17, 2013.