garbled newbie

D

dgvc63

New member
New member and tinkering with an old TEAC cassette deck V-400x. Can't seem to get a clean recording at any level. Made several recordings of voice, acoustic guitar and amplified guitar. (single mic, left channel only Shure SM58- Maxell XLII tape) Never redlining during recording but almost constant redlining on playback.


Any thoughts? Bad record head?


*Bought it for $6 and took it home, VERY squeaky. Cleaned the heads and rollers, opened it up and lubed what I could without disassembling.

**originally posted in Analog only but not receiving any help...
 
*Further testing with stereo system produced a beautiful recording of some old vinyl. More confused than ever as I've tested the mic separately as well with good results... anyone?
 
Can't see what the problem is here, unless there is a bad connection. How have you converted the XLR mic lead to unbalanced jack plug?

Also the mic will be low impedance (LowZ) and the mic input on a TEAC deck will be High impedance, but I have used LowZ mics many years ago on TEAC decks with no problem, it could be that the LowZ mic is causing a miss read of the metering somehow? If you have one of these around try it on the input.

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Cheers

Alan.
 
Yes I was using an adapter on the Shure. I just repeated the experiment with a super-cheap Radio Shack mic equipped with a 1/4" jack instead of xlr with the same result.
 
Hmmm... now that you've mentioned the meters. They accurately performed in-line with the stereo so that would make me suspect the mic inputs themselves.
 
The best I can figure is that one must use some sort of preamp or signal modification before going to the mic inputs on these decks. I ran a mic through a second deck with center mic feature out and into the V-400x, same mic, same tape, same set up and a beautiful recording was produced.
 
I suspect as someone suggested earlier with the transformer post that it is indeed an impedance mismatch with the mic. Read up on the decks specs and you should find the info you need. Good luck
 
It could be a dirty connection on the mic input circuit? is there a selector switch for mic / line input? maybe the switch has dirty contacts? or the actual mic jacks are dirty?

Alan.
 
It is likely that the mic preamps are not very good.
If you want to persevere with cassette recording and the machine truly does give good results on line in sources, invest in a small mixer. The Behringer Xenyx 802 will give you two very decent mic pres and with phantom power for future capacitor mics (you will not find spook juice on a tape machine!) Other good budget mixers are Yamaha, a Soundcraft Notebook if you can find one, and of course Tascam (Teac) themselves!

Dave.
 
Thanks to all

Thanks everyone. Seems to be and issue of raw mic signal/impedance in this particular deck. All is well, thanks again!
 
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