Advanced Video Systems

If youre like me you have boxes of beta and vhs tapes, carousels of ecktachrome slides, records, cassette tapes, photograph negatives and 8 mm home films somewhere in storage in hopes of getting all of these treasures onto digital media. Remember, the later you wait the greater the possibility the footage may get too brittle or slide or photo may get damaged and then youre stuck with something that cant be retrieved. Do yourself a favor and bring your collection of memories to Advanced Video Systems. I recently had on old beta tape transferred over to dvd and I couldnt have been more happy with the work. They have every machine from yesteryear in tip top working condition to transfer pretty much anything you have into the digital world. The staff is awesome, very personable and friendly, and actually care about getting it done right — the first time. Their facility is modern with the retro touch, and their walls are adorned with award after award of great customer satisfaction. Trust me — if there’s a place that you need this service — this is the place for sure. 5 star review.

I recently decided that I wanted — after years of having delayed facing the task — to finally get some old audio cassette tapes of some psychic readings that I had received 25 years ago converted to digital audio file format so that I could store the audio files on my PC and play them on my PC at will.
Since I have a strong background as both an electronics engineer and a scientist, and since I do have some old audio cassette tape decks and cables here, and since the PC software for converting the audio from a tape deck into a usable digital audio file is freely available on the web, I briefly considered performing the audio cassettte tape-​to-​digital file format conversion on each of the tapes myself, but I ultimately decided that such a job would be a major headache, and also a major distraction from my work, and that I was not interested in doing the format conversion job myself.
Thus, I started to look around on the web for a company that could perform such a audio cassettte tape-​to-​digital file format conversion for me. I was willing to consider any company in the field, no matter where it was located in the US, so long as they seemed to be very competent and so long as they had a good reputation.
Interestingly, after all of my online research had been complerted, the company that I finally settled upon was an audio-​visual services company located in my own state (Maryland) and located only about 35 miles from my home!
The aforementioned company that I ultimately selected as a result of my web serarch was Advanced Video Systems in Owings Mills, MD. I selected them over all of the other contenders around the country because their website impressed me, and because I found some very good reviews of their services online, and better, when I called them to discuss the possibility of asking them to perform the audio cassettte tape-​to-​digital file format conversion on the four cassette tapes, the technician with whom I spoke, a man named Andrew, had all the right answers, and assured me that they could easily perform the required conversions, and that they could deliver the digital audio files to me on audio CDs, one CD per side of each cassette tape. He also assured me that it would be possible for me to send them the tapes via postal mail or UPS (or Fedex) and that they could return the tapes, plus the audio CDs, to me via Fedex. He also assured me that expedited/​rush service was available, if needed.
I also mentioned to the technician during our phone call that two of the tapes, due in part to age, and due in part to the rather strange and scratchy voice characteristics of one of the people (an elderly woman) whose voice had been recorded on those tapes, were of rather poor audio quality, and he assured me that he would be able to use some audio filtering and processing algorithms to at least partially clean up the messy audio on those two tapes.
Since I had received all the right answers from the tech, I proceeded to send the cassette tapes to the shop. They processed them promptly, and the tech (Andrew) even called me a couple of times during the transfer-​and-​conversion process to discuss specific questions that he had about the audio quality and characteristics on one of the tapes, and he also suggested an audio signal processing technique that he could run to help to remediate at least some of that problem.
The bottom line is that just 3 business days after this shop had received my tapes, I received a Fedex package from them containing the original audio tapes and eight audio CDs containing high-​quality digital audio files. BTW, I then converted these digital audio CDs, using my PC, to another digital file format (.wma file format) and transferred them to my hard drive, and put the audio CDs into storage to serve as archival backups. (I later learned from the tech at AVS that, had I asked, they could have created the .wma or similar digital audio files for me at their shop!)
So, excellent shop, excellent service, and I have since used them for a second similar audio cassettte tape-​to-​digital file format conversion job, where one of the cassete tapes, now about 25 years old, had audio that had faded so badly across the years that it was barely audible, and was almost completely buried in the noise!
I would highly recommend this company to anyone for audio or video technical services!