4 track cassete recorders that rule!

[DanV]

4 track cassete recorders that rule!

I'm interested in hearing about which people like - which they dont - cool quirks - remarkable anecdotes etc etc etc etc etc etc

Enlighten us, all mighty low end theorists!

[heinz]

The best 4-track cassette machine I ever owned was the Akai MG614. Sort of a mini-version of their MG1212, it had the super GX head and high speed recording. I must've recorded over 500 songs on that thing, it was a workhorse.

http://fr.audiofanzine.com/img/produ...b2/6/1/612.jpg

[Drumsound]

Dude,

ALL 4-track cassette decks are cool!

[pan]

Tascam Studio 644 - totally awesome quadruple multitracker with 8 channel mixer (plus 8 MixB) 2 aux-busses and routing matrix.
had some type of dbx dolby-kind of compression, that really fattened things up - when turned off in playback. !glue!
My first commercially published track was mixed on it.
Ahh, the Atari Days in the cellar...

[Jay Kahrs]

I had a Tascam 464 back in the day. The coolest thing was that it had 4 XLR inputs and a couple of 1/4" too plus it could record on all 4 tracks at once.

Sweet.

Wish I still had it.

[pgk]

tascam 424 mk2

i will use mine until it disintegrates. and after it does i'll always try to have one lying around. i always use the dbx, on either speed. i record band rehearsals with an external mixer hooked up to it (for it's phantom power), then bring it upstairs to send a drum, bass and vocal mix into one channel to refine guitar parts. i've re-done crappy bootleg recordings thru it; level, eq, pitch correction, etc. so many things. i've gotten recordings on it that were good enough sonically for commercial release. i love cassettes, always have, always will. you could'nt give me a dat machine for free, blech. it's really been a great pre-production tool for me. an excellent tool actually.....

[Ruphus]

OT:
Always had been wanting one, but at that time was putting all cash into motorbiking.
Thus rather experienced with stereo tape decks I want to remind to what good cassetes have been. TDK S-A / S-AX.
Best I ever tried. Better than BASF for instance and they seem to preserve the audio for ever.

Ruphus

[LTA]

I pulled out my old tascam 424 mk II a few months ago. I never realized how much running a daw while songwriting keeps things from running smoothly in the "one man show" environment. The limitations are empowering. If you are careful with levels and commit a bit of outboard eq and compression to tape, you can get it to sound pretty good with a reasonable noise floor. It even works okay using the onboard eq for mostly cuts.

With great river and focusrite front ends, it has never sounded better either :)

[pgk]

"The limitations are empowering"

oh yeah

"If you are careful with levels...."

that is key...

"With great river and focusrite front ends, it has never sounded better either"

i hear ya! i'm thinking along the same lines, but with something like 4 john hardy pres going right into it; patch 'em into the line inputs, then take the direct tape rca outputs straight into whatever.

very crazy? you bet your ass.
potentially enlightening? you bet your ass.

and i will do it someday

gimme a 424 over a dat machine any day of the week.....

[DanV]

Super thread - thanks to all the contributors..

Pan,
What's the deal with the Tascam Studio 644 --- I see it has some kind of midi functionality - is that just to remote control it or something??? That and the 688 look super fresh --- retailed at something over 2g back when it was new --- now available for like $200 on ebay -- they look like GREAT Low End fodder imo.

Please excuse me if this is taking things too far OT but I have another question for the group:

What are some of your favorite tape brands??

[pgk]

maxell period. i pre-roll all my cassettes. i've had good luck with sony and fuji tape in the past, but it seems my deck is not biased for them. my deck (s; all of them) likes maxell best; udxl2 specifically. tdk tape is the just absolute pits; their tape has given me nothing but major hassles, and every freakin' time too. dropout city, for starters. and after the famous stephen st croix/ tdk war in mix over their cdr media (remember THAT?) i'll never buy another thing from them again.

[Don]

I miss my old porta..I might get one for band rehersal.You can get the Tascam 424 M3 for like 300.00 new..Hmmm Great River frontend..That could be fun

[LTA]

Originally posted by Don
I miss my old porta..I might get one for band rehersal.You can get the Tascam 424 M3 for like 300.00 new..Hmmm Great River frontend..That could be fun

Its whatever you have sitting around :)

In its prime, I made a custom wiring harness to hook it up to a very used mackie 1604. Felt so bad cutting up a hosa 8 channel snake to make it. Just replaced 4 of the rca's with 1/4 plugs, but it was tampering with a huge investment. Had a DEP5 i picked up "new" (10 year old floor model) for about 125, and had a dbx 266 (the original) stereo compressor. I had 6 samson r11's i picked up for less than the (cheap) mic cables cost, and it was good.

Later i picked up a midiman midi inteface (biport?) that let me stripe and sync an outdated quadra 610 (running the demo/intro version of cubase that came with a keyboard) to timecode on track 4.

After figuring out how to get rid of the ground loop issue (and figuring out what a ground loop was in the first place), bouncing through the mixer back to an open track along with eq, compression, and reverb (and an occasional live part) was the thing to do. After a decade or two of "upgrading" my gear so i could do it like the big guys and not have to commit sounds early as DAW track counts are fairly unlimited, you look back and realize you were doing it right in the first place before you went and made it all complicated.

People that are getting their first experiences on their own with a demo/free DAW are going to be screwed in the long run.

And as something idiotic you can do with a 4 track, i opened mine up, reconnected the cables so it would work, and calibrated the levels so they would playback with the same meter reading as they were recorded. Didn't have a clue what i was doing, but it worked out. Looked at the back page of the manual and induced how to do it. The PC board pots were cleverly labeled, and i got to figure out how the thing worked to boot. About a 1/3 of the way into the process, i panicked after realizing if it didn't work out i was going to really screw the thing up, but it came out okay. Record, playback, tweak, record, playback, tweak, record, playback, tweak. Single head tape machines are time consuming, but it was fun and easy the first time calibrating a 2" with both sel-rep and repro heads. Sure there were more pots to be tweaked, but you had realtime feedback to the adjustments.

Everything i ever needed to know about recording, i learned on my 4 track :)