snow lizard
Dedicated Slacker
Ryan Murphy said:But I am going to try something here. I am going to use the balanced lines to send two channels of audio to the 16 channel tape that way I fill up all 16 channels with 8 outputs and mix it with 8 mixer inputs coming back the same way onto the computer.
K.
It's analog and everything, but imagine it was digital for a second. I set the sample rate to 48k. I mult the output of the source to record 2 channels of 48k. So far so good. There might be creative reasons to do that. If I combine those 2 48k tracks, it won't be like using 96k sampling. There's other guys here with more analog experience than me, but I'm thinking any limitations imposed by track width and the basic specs of the machine won't be improved by doubling the tracks, and unlike digital where those tracks would basically just sum, there could be other complications that could degrade the sound when you combine the tracks.
Now if I wanted to mult a source to 2 recording channels and print one dry, and annihilate the other with sinister and ungodly amounts of apocalyptic compression, that's a creative choice. It might not be a useful thing to do, but recording is a creative process.
The manual for your mixer has instructions for how to make 2 kinds of Y cables, one for inserts and one for mults. What you're trying to do by what you're describing here is a mult. Splitting the + and - halves of a balanced line is not how to do it. You really should read that manual.
Another thing is, someone already pointed out that the Fostex unit might have a mult function allowing you to send to each track with a 4 buss mixer. You really should read that manual too.
Sending one output to multiple inputs is called a mult. Sending multiple outputs to one input requires a mixer, not a mult cable.