RMGI tape

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wkrbee

Active member
Greetings.One of my clients brought me a Tascam 48.He wanted it biased for the RMGI SM900.How do you read the date code? The tape is supposedly one year old but sheds horribly,and also skews in the guides.ATR and 456 do not do the skew thing.Bad lot of tape with poor slitting?
 
That's not unusual for RMGI (of any date) in my experience, and it could be for either reason (or some other reason we've not thought of).
 
Yep.I use ATR on both my MSR 16 and my 42B.Told customer,he went to get new RMGI,no stock until mid April.He's buying ATR- and it gives a much better pack in spool mode.Baking only works for a short period when you want to transfer already recorded tape.
 
Baking doesn't work with RMGI. They had a different problem early on. Give them a call. They may exchange it. I don't use RMGI or ATR. There's too much perfectly good NOS Quantegy, 3M/Scotch and BASF/EMTEC at half the cost or less... and IMO better products.

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wkrbee said:
What 3M types are not subject to SSS Beck?
Click to expand...

I've never had a bad reel of 3M 206/207 or 986. 226 is a different story. It was meant to be a bias compatible competitor with Ampex 456 and it was one of my favorites before SSS reared its ugly head. Now 226 is the worst, so avoid that.

206 was the older formulation, but when you consider 206 is what Tom Scholz used to lay down most of the original tracks for the Boston debut album, you stop worrying too much about +/- 3dB this way or that way. And he started with 12 tracks on a 1-inch Scully... home recording 1976 style.

I use 1/2-inch and 1/4-inch tape. I haven't paid more than $45.00 for a reel of any kind of 1/2-inch tape since "The Tape Crisis" when Quantegy suddenly closed its doors. And much less for 1/4-inch tape. I have a good stash though. It's easy for me to take my time. Searching with common misspellings and typos people make helps me find NOS that no one even sees. The downside is we're dealing with mostly amateur sellers, so helps to ask questions.

This would be more difficult in a busy commercial studio. I don't have to worry about that either.

I am surprised at the number of people who purchase well-known SSS tape however. I'm sure many people do it knowingly with the misconception that they can bake tape for future use. Not a misconception to their mind though... they think they know an insider trick or just want the metal reels if it goes for really low. It seldom goes low enough for that IMO.

ATR and RMGI are ok, but insane high prices people have become accustomed to. It's like ... oops I didn't want a second car... but just a reel of tape.
 
I bought a bunch of empty reels on eBay for next to nothing. I now buy RMGI SM 911 pancakes for $70 each. I haven't had any sticky problems with the new tape. From what I've read, the Tascam 48 is set up to run 456 or equivalent. I've never tried ATR or SM 900, but I'm wondering if these formulas get the best out of the deck?
 
I ended up setting up the 48 for ATR.set it up for +6-plenty of adjustment room both with the bias and record level pots.Pretty much flat out to 20K. -3DB @ 25 KHZ.Client is recording metal/punk bands.He's printing drums and dumping them into Pro-tools.He's very happy with the 48 and ATR.
 
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Is that 0VU @ +6dB? (or the tried & true 0VU=+3dB allowing for +3VU=+6dB peaks?)

What dB over-bias did you use for ATR?

Do you think a 38 would support the same adjustment targets?

Thank you.

:spank::eek:;)
 
+6 over 185nw. 1KHZ playback from 250nw MRL tape -3db.Biased 2.5-3 db over @ 10KHZ. Bumped up Record level +3db.Minor bias tweek to a few tracks to smooth out 10-20 KHZ response.Not too hot for crosstalk but hot enough for drums to hit the tape good-which is what the client wanted.
 
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