For all sorts of reasons related to being of a certain age & because I can, I recently bought this: It is a Tascam 34B. It needs calibrating to RMGI LPR35, which is the equivalent of Quantegy/Ampex 457. I know there used to be a couple of recording engineers on the old site, have they migrated to here? And do they have 1/4" 457 calibration tape they can lend me? And can they tell me how to do it? Ta muchly.
Sorry I can't help but that is awesome. I'm a location sound recordist, so I'm all digital but analogue sounds glorious!
I miss my dad's old analogue 1/4" machine. Built it himself from components, he did. Amazing sound quality. Alas, all lost now. :frown:
I can't help with the technical stuff, but applaud the fact you continue to embrace more 'traditional techology'. Good luck with setting it up.
It actually sounds pretty good, now that I've cleaned the heads & tape path properly & sorted out a couple of idiotic bodges that the previous (clueless) owner had done & worked out how get 4 channels output into a 2 channel amp, so it must have been set up for something similar to 457, I just know there's the potential for so much more! I love reel to reels, a mates dad had a state of the art TEAC x2000R when I was younger & it was always something I lusted after. X2000s go for big money these days, but ex studio stuff like Tascam & Fostex can be had at bargain prices, unless you want Studer kit, which can go stratospheric.
Hmmm......why would anyone want to go back to tape hiss, peak distortion, high frequency crushing, wow & flutter, print-through, 31 minutes recording on a 10" reel of tape costing £25 or more, etc, etc, etc......? Sorry, as a professional sound engineer working with classical music, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I was able to ditch 1/4" tape and work exclusively with digits. I must confess that the old tale machines do look good though. Oh well - each to their own.
Oh you've hit the nail on the head there mate, it's almost entirely a "look at me" piece of kit! But with modern back coated tape print though is less of a problem, and I'll be running at 7.5ips not 15 so i should get 96 minutes per 3608 foot tape or even 192 mins if I only record 2 channels & flip the tape, so that's at least 4 albums per tape which makes the cost bearable! Also the deck came with a load of reels of shitty sticky Ampex tape. The tape might well be horrid, but the metal reels are pristine, so I can buy nice new RMGI tape as pancakes at about £16 a shot. Interesting that you like digital, do you record to redbook spec, or in the highest possible bitrate & then dumb down to CD spec later on?
Everything is recorded at 48kHz, 24 bit and then converted to 44.1/16bit for CD and broadcast. I would go up to 96kHz or even higher but the mixer I use would need extra hardware which costs a small fortune. I still use mics and a headphone amp with valves in them though which kind of defeats my own argument a bit. They do sound great though.
I've heard a couple of tracks recorded at 192khz(?) FLAC of a mates band & as much as I am an analogue fan, they did sound superb. Then they mixed down to CD and all the life had gone out of it. SACD is better, and DVD "A" even better still, but very niche these days. I suppose Blu-ray audio must be better still, but there is this move away from physical media which I find quite saddening.
I'm a "on location" sound recordist (or taper), and consider myself oldschool for recording at 44.1kHz, but the above kit is amazing! Must upgrade to 48/24 at some point. I currently use a Nomad JB3 and iRiver H140, though I have an iRiver H108 (CF mod) for backup.
On location (in various concert halls all over the place) I always use a portable SADiE LRX-2 multi-track hard-disc recorder - up to 32 mics with phantom power and 8 digital inputs/outputs all recorded on a lap-top. It's ridiculously small compared to the mixers and recorders I used to carry around and the quality is way better than anything I've tried. The whole kit costs less than what you would have had to pay for one of the Studer 2-track analogue tape recorders I used at one time. Moving up to 24/48 certainly makes a difference, even to my old ears but I must confess that I make a back-up copy on CD-R of everything just in case. It's still reassuring to have a physical object in the archive rather than just a hard-drive with .wav files on it.
Don't have room for CD's anymore! I back up everything to FLAC, and store both the original recording and tracked recording on external hard drives (one at work) just in case anything happens to my pc. Torrenting the better recordings is fun too.
