I've got a 1214 sitting in closet waiting for restoration. It has the common problem where the back-up battery leaked and took out some track on the board.
I hope I can get round to it it next year.

Correction: it's a 1212 , not a 1214 .

I had that problem on my Mg1212 and MG1214. I have three and have replaced the battery with a later version and moved it off the board. It is really just like a car, you have to maintain it, no big deal really especially if you can do it yourself. The sound you get out of them depends on how you record and what you record. Everything sounds great with a great performance and if you get one engineer to record on it verses someone that may not have as much experience the difference in quality can be night and day. How about Rebel Yell by Billy Idol. Sounds amazing.

I always thought that was the whole point of drum solos? Guitarists etc go take a leak, do a couple shots, smoke a ciggie and whatever else was to be imbibed.. then we walk back on and finish the set.

I remember drooling over those and the bigger Tascams back in the day. Best I could do was a Tascam Portastudio. Neighborhood spoiled brat had a rich daddy so he had a Tascam 16x8 console and Otari 1/2" 8 track in his basement studio.

Then one day I got a decent day job around the turn of the millenium. Bought a used Tascam MS-16 1 in. 8-track. Pretty decent machine. Used it for 3 projects if even. Too much hassle and tape was getting hard to come by. Besides, with DAWs getting cheaper and interfaces getting better cheaper.. what was the point? Unless you're running a proper muti room commercial; studio where an analog deck is part of your thing it's too much trouble. A DAW has at most a couple moving parts. Cooling fans and a Hard Disk. If it's all SSDs then just the fans. A good tape deck, even cassette has a lot of moving parts that all have to be in alignment to work right. Can't tell you how many mini phillips screwdrivers, #2 pencils and scotch tape & razor blades it took to fix the inevitable cassette tape problems.

plus, a fifteen minute drum solo is three five minute songs your band doesn't have to learn to pad out the set.

SD USB look at bad audio
Remember your old handyman cam
What happens to your data

you forgot to mention "chemtrails".

Don't buy Chinese tape! They've implanted surveillance devices in the magnetic particles.

Poppycock! The magnetic particles ARE the devices. They have been secretly polarized to always align for maximum transmission to Beijing.

I don't know about that, but, in the 70s in the UK I worked at a shop that sold Russian made radiograms branded as "Rigonda." They were imported in some sort of trade deal in which the UK sent the Russians shoes, and they paid in cameras and electronic equipment!

The shortwave section of each one had been carefully aligned for peak sensitivity around the radio Moscow frequencies.

And punctuation. And possibly grammar and/or coherence.

This thread belongs in a damn museum, because it is Art.


I'm only about halfway through, did anyone ever point out the existence (and failure) of the Elcaset? Because what's being described was basically an Elcaset deck with DAW control.

EDIT: no, don't tell me, I want it to be a surprise.

That's very interesting. Never heard of the Elcaset. Seems like it was a doomed idea from the start. However, I've always thought that if someone made a standard cassette deck that would use chrome tape and run at 7 1/2 ips, that would have been very useful in the studio. A sixty minute cassette tape would only be good for 15 minutes of audio running at 7 and 1/2 but with chrome tape capability, it would far exceed a reel to reel running at 7 1/2 ips.

I think the Elcasete would have been (and still would be) a great format for a Portastudio-type recorder - 1/4" tape instead of cassette tape!

And it would be even better at 7 1/2 ips.

In that case it would be essentially a Tascam 388.

By the way...the RCA Victor Tape Cartridge was pretty much the same thing as the Elcaset but introduced in 1950, 26 years before the Elcaset.

I listened to some YT videos of the RCA Victor...thought it sounded really good.

Like you said..a 7 1/2 ips chrome cassette recorder would be nice too

The reason nobody will do this is money. It would be really expensive to do. The r&d needed to pull this off vs the actual market for sales? As cool as an idea that it is the market is just not there. However Tascam just released the Model 24 which seems like a cool idea.

The AKAI 1212s did something similar. Not much of a market for them, however.

Intel mmm
Are they a recording studio engineer
Avid are they a direct recorder mmm
Does China Leader get paid ever time you
buy a computer welcome to China happy Fake
Music with errors I love tape prove me wrong
and I will support a lie if I have to
but NSA Records me while I work
prove me wrong I don’t drink and I am cool
with Tape digital is trash and I don’t master before I record tape and tubes rule forever

Whoa dude, put the drink down and get out of the sun. I think you're heatstroking down there in Me-ah-mi.

Still unclear.

You might have to give up the mushrooms, too.

Tape? Really?

Wait ... lemme go trade in my car for a horse and buggy.
Tear out the toilets and buy some nice bed pans.
Dump this here computer and get an adding machine and a typewriter.
Quit my job in tech and become a black smith.

Yep, that's the ticket.

Well, sometimes I feel like pounding a hammer on the servers.

But yes, I agree with your general gist. If tape was so superior the pros wouldn’t have abandoned it like they did. And they abandoned it a while ago when digital wasn’t nearly as good and cheap as it is now. But you can’t caress a plug-in so it doesn’t feel as good to use it.

I met a guy who had one. It ran at 7 1/2 ips (as the high speed!) and gave 10 minutes of recording time. He was largely disappointed in it and considered it fit only for "demos".

People today forget - or perhaps never knew - that the playing field for tape recorders was not at all level. The recording studio world was roughly divided into places that made "records", and places that made "demos". And the deciding factor was usually the tape deck and its "large" or "small" format.

This division was much sharper than it is today, when super clean (super cheap) accurate capture is a given and the difference between cheap and expensive DAWs is only a matter of features, not a matter of signal-to-noise ratios.

That they used a proprietary "Beta" type format was a colossally inept move. Why the hell didn't they just use Beta tapes? It confounded me when I had the MG1214. I think that was one of their downfalls.

Having owned both the Akai and an ADAT, I applauded Alesis that they chose to let users use stock S-VHS tapes.

Yep, so true, and well explained.

I've got one in the queue for repair later this year. I'll see how it sounds then. The owner has no interest in using it to record, but want to transfer his old tapes. He said I could have it it after that. I assume I'll then give it away to some local kids who are interested in that sort of thing.

It's hard to believe anyone ever made another recording device, given that this was the last word in sound creation.

The "newest contribution to the fulfillment of artistic innovation . . .for those of us who truly appreciate good sound"

Actually, I don't remember these sounding that bad, But I'll see when (if) I get the thing going again .

An 8 track recorder will cost thousands of dollars. With that, you get hiss, limited freqency response, lossy duplication, limited dynamic range, limited recording time, no editing, no mixing, no preamps, maintenance requirements, and expensive consumables to record on.

With a few thousand dollars and a DAW you get state of the art sound quality, unlimited editing, lossless duplication, virtually unlimited recording time, cheap consumables, mixing, effects, automation... and the list goes on and on.

Totally missing the point of the thread.

Digital vs Analogue is old, and a useless discussion on this board. People have their preferences, and the reasons are numerous and not all about sonics to be perfectly honest. Personally i love tape, but i also love the DAW. Hybrid set-ups are very common now. Tape will not go away. When the machines are all dying (and there's plenty of lifetimes in a well maintained machine if the owner is willing to do the leg work).....then someone will step in to solve the problem. We may see new machines, but it will probably be niche, unless demand ramps up, and if there's demand, there will be a product. Whether these things every get massed produced once more, it will be someone like Behringer with mass production clout who will be doing the manufacturing, for better or worse. For all the naysayer talk, it will happen if there is a user base waiting with money. There may also be those weirdos who just get up and do it. Hell, I've been thinking of doing it myself. If you have skills, and the knowledge, then things are possible.