aligning, demagnetizing, and cleaning...how long?

[smythology]

aligning, demagnetizing, and cleaning...how long does it take?

...how long does this all take on your average professional analog recorder before a day's session?

...does it depend on the number of tracks?

A lot of engineers today prefer digital simply because they're sick of doing these daily required preparations, despite the digital descrepencies.

Be honest. Are you guys starting to get sick of it and thinking of going back, too?

I don't think I will...

robin

 

[blues-hacker]

Hey guy, I can't speak to all models of recorder, but I have a Tascam 38, so from that perspective...

I like to let the machine warm up for at least 15 minutes before recording anything. I have one of the tascam handheld demagnetizers. So I'll plug that in, I get about 5 ft away from the deck, turn it on, walk in, wave it around the heads for a few seconds, walk away, and turn it off. Then turn the tape deck and mixer(Tascam M320B) on, get the swabs and some 99% isopropyl alcohol, and proceed to give the heads a going over. Then I set up some patch cords, pull out the reference tone CD, get that set up, by now the heads are thoroughly dry, so load up a reel of tape, and about 15 min have gone by. I don't align very frequently, I just use the test tones off the CD to set/ check levels, ie is 0db out at the mixer resulting in 0db at the deck, and that's pretty much it. What I really like about tape is at the end of the session, I just take the reel off, label it, box it, and I'm done.

while I have a hard disk based digital, I won't track to it, because I don't have a good way off downloading all the tracks in any kind of quick, convenient manner. I just use it for mixing down to, and each mix gets burned to a CDRW.

So back to your original question, maybe at max we looking at a half hour prep time, while at the same time tube amps and such are warming up. To me the hard disk download is more of a PITA, so no, I'm not going back.

b-h