sweetnubs
New member
I'm missing something. If he can bypass the 1/4" inputs on the four tracker then it must have xlr inputs. If it has xlr inputs why would he need the xlr inputs on a different mixer?
mshilarious
Banned
Most Tascam mic pres don't have phantom power, although a few late models added it. They are also a bit low on gain, and like the usual cheap pre noisy in the top range. That can make it hard to hit the tape loud. Having said that, the noise of the tape usually still dominates. Even so, whether XLR or line in, if you hit the line ins with the right level, you avoid the need to crank the Tascam pres. Also, you can submix more channels to the 4 tracks you got.
Input impedance was fairly highish. I remember 2.7K although I could be making that up. I don't remember the line input impedance off hand, but my unit didn't have any instrument inputs.
I don't remember the EQ section being offensive. Mostly it just wasn't useful. The smaller decks didn't have channel inserts, usually just an effects send/return.
If you are really crazy, you can open up the unit and reroute the circuit to feed the tape direct from the line input. There are a lot of opamps on the tape return board too, I don't have the schematic and I didn't trace it. The mixer board was straightforward to follow, but the tape return board was a lot more involved than I would have guessed. I didn't really look too close, I just opened it up for a good cleaning before I transferred the last of my 10+ year old stuff.
As things go, I haven't had time to put it back together
The faders are clean though 
sweetnubs
New member
Oh yeah I guess the phantom power issue and high impedance/low gain of the inputs makes sense. Been a long time since I've touched a cassette four tracker! Salut 1982!
mshilarious
Banned
I think I graduated from boomboxes' internal mics to a 4 track only in 1990
That first unit, every punch in made an audible pop on the track, so you had to watch the faders on mixdown 
Also, something was wrong with the erase head, because I have a couple of tracks with really quiet backwards thrash metal that had originally been on the other side of the tape 
Actually, that improved our songs considerably 
I have to say if you look inside a '90s vintage Tascam, you'll be somewhat impressed with the quality of the engineering. The parts used aren't very sexy, but the PCBs are totally solid, and it's all fit together nicely. It's a build quality you won't see in a modern cheap mixer. And there was really no reason for Tascam to go crazy on the pres when the medium was a cassette tape. The fidelity there is about the same as a Soundblaster.
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analog aaron
Swami King of Poppers
Huh? I must be missing something. Aligned carefully, set up right? It's a cassette for god's sakes. You pop it in and go.
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Tim Gillett
Banned
Huh? I must be missing something. Aligned carefully, set up right? It's a cassette for god's sakes. You pop it in and go.
Sure, you pop it in and go. And if it's not set up right it will sound mediocre. No contradiction.
The achilles heel of cassette recording was noise. The solution was dbx or dolby NR. It worked, but only if the machine was in good condition and set up right. Analog NR was fussy, especially with cassette.
Portastudios werent designed for easy servicing and alignment. They were made down to a price for the home user. Adjustments normally accessible from the outside on pro gear required the machine to be dismantled. It took time and effort to get the bias, level, etc right, much more than comparable pro 3 head machines. (Just cos all those adjustments werent visible from the outside of the machine doesnt mean they werent there. They were buried in the middle of the internal circuit boards and hard to get at).
It was probably easier and faster aligning a pro reel to reel deck than a Portastudio.
As a result, many home users found getting the alignment right too hard or too expensive, especially with dbx and Dolby, so they switched it off. And they got hissy recordings.
With care, a portastudio could sound very good. The fact that you could "pop it in and go" was irrelevent to this. The industry used various types of audio and video cassettes for decades. Still do but now it's digital tape. And they too needed careful machine alignment to get good results.
I'm a tech. That's a tech's perspective.
Tim
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Dani Pace
New member
The only real advantage in using an external mixer (for me) with a 4 track has been when recording drums. The case I am referring to was a drummer who insisted that each drum and cymbal had to be micked individually, recorded all at once, on 2 tracks (premixed stereo), I used 14 mics total and 2 eight channel mono mixers on 2 tracks to accomplish this. It was a hassle to set up and do, but it worked.
andyhix
:dank:
This is a situation where you turn 8 of those 14 mics off completely and tell the drummer how great it sounds because of all the mics.
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analog aaron
Swami King of Poppers
I don't doubt any of what you say, but I was under the impression that the recorders come from the factory set-up and ready to go? Meaning the bias set for type II cassettes. I've taken a few machines apart myself and have repaired tape transports, changed belts. etc. Though I have never aligned heads. When I got a closer look, it looked to me as if the factory "Glues" the head alignment screws down so the heads won't easily get out of wack. Sometimes the glue is a clear red, blue or green color.
I do realize over time that machines do require servicing, but I'm not going to be paranoid or anal over it. As long as the machine has relatively low use and the owner cleans and demags the heads on a regular basis, he or she should be ok. Although everyone out there using 4 tracks try to acheive the best possible recording with the knowledge they have, Nobody I know tries to produce a pro level record using a 4 or 8 track cassette. Nobody I know uses the same machine for 20yrs/12 hours a day. They are simply a quick tool for capturing ideas. These machines are supposed to be fun, and they are! Simply designed for their intended purpose........Hense the word......."DEMOS"
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Tim Gillett
Banned
Actually I used to like their lightness and portability. I used to use a small Yamaha 4 track to record some of our band's live gigs because I sure wasnt going to lug along my whacking big Teac A 3440 reel to reel to the gig.
But again, the models with built in powerful and sophisticated noise reduction like dbx II or Dolby C, had the potential for great recordings but because with NR they tended to drift out of alignment quickly and because realigning them was so difficult, most people didnt bother even using the NR, and you can hardly blame them.
The potential was there though and if we could do a practical demo, I could show just how good a humble little Portastudio could sound, when it was tweaked to the max.
Cheers Tim
