Direct to tape input?

[scorpio01169]

I have been recording for about 14 years now and I'm still learning new stuff as I'm going along. My question here is I have a Mackie 32.8 analog console and for years I have been using outboard tube pre's for vocal recording going into the line ins of the Mackie, just like all of us we get to thinking and can't get ideas out of our heads. I got to thinking, Why am I going into the line in of my board when I can just go directly into my recorder to get the pure sound of my tube pre. I read that another well known engineer does this by daisy chaining mic into preamp into an outboard eq into an outboard compressor/lim straight into his tape input. Is there a benefit to this? or am I gonna get the same results if I went through the line in of my board?

 

[bouldersoundguy]

Using the board gives you some routing options, like control room and headphone mixes. Since those are digital recorders (in your sig) there may be some delay when monitoring live inputs via the recorder outputs.

Taking unnecessary stuff out of the signal path is not a bad idea, but I'm not convinced you'll get a great sonic benefit.

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Taking unnecessary stuff out of the signal path is not a bad idea, but I'm not convinced you'll get a great sonic benefit.

Agreed.

It really depends on how horrible your mixer really is or isn't. The Mackie 32x8 boards were decently clean and quiet but not necessarily all that "musical" sounding...many claiming the top end was on the brittle side, sound wise. So, if the recordings were coming out with that characteristic in them, the mixer itself might be part of that problem. Cue monitoring could still be accomplished with a split feed from the tube pre-amp.

Cheers!

 

[altruistica]

I am about to do exactly the same thing.

My convoluted setup means accessing the Allen & Heath desk which I have and which is very nice, means keeping the initial wiring of the desk in my head. As I'm not using it every day, I always seem to have a senior moment when I think....'now how did I wire all this up'.

I'm about to simplify the studio by recording direct to the recorder inputs (be it tape, hard disk or computer) and have all the outputs appear on the patchbay where they can simply be patched into the inputs of a digital mixer (Behringer X32 RACK). This mixer has 16 analogue ins and 32digital ins and outs. It means my TASCAM MX2424 can be routed to digitally and the whole thing can be seyup to suit whichever recorder I'm using. I can just about do this with the Allen & Heath, but remembering all the analogue ins and outs can be tiresome. Also the MX2424 has a weird analogue level that makes interfacing via analogue more difficult than ADAT.

Al