Recent content by ladewd

Dave, I guess for most of my career, I was backed by a big company. When Sony bought our company (MCI) they mistakenly purchased the company because it held the US market share of recording equipment at that time. Sony ran it into the ground. I originally worked at the factory & parts were...

I see I missed a couple of your questions. Reel to reel is an expensive proposition. Tape is pretty expensive & then you have the expense of some sort of mixer. You get what you pay for. I had a really nice 1” 16 track but the cost of tape made me sell it about 10 yrs ago. I cut corners wherever...

Honestly, during this pandemic, it can be very possible that the parts supply chain has broken down. I’m sure during normal times things would have gone a lot smoother. Of course I can relate to the money & music comments as I was a professional musician long before I got into electronics. It...

I’m not intimately familiar with the machine. Is it a cassette style deck? If so, the problem can be worn hardware. Most of the machines I’ve worked on were reel to reel, analog & digital. If the problem was a reel motor not turning it was usually an electronic issue, and not motor related...

Parts availability can be a big problem. If he’s a Tascam partner, he should have access to parts but he’s caught between a rock & a hard place if Tascam is back ordered on parts. The shop I work in used to do the smaller Tascam 8mm decks. Parts used to be easy to get, but things got really...

I’m in the LA area. I worked at MCI/Sony for 25yrs in their service department. I used to fix tape decks all the time, however, due to demanding customers & hard to source parts, I gave up on fixing them. Remember this, tape machines are a bitch. They are filled with moving parts, motors, servo...

Years ago we had a weekly session for the Telemon Society. They would play pre Bach music on recorders live to two track. Those whistle type instruments were tough to capture smoothly. I think we usually used a pair of U87‘S in X/Y to capture them. They wouldn’t let us use dynamics, but the...

The one detail I see missing in this thread is the detail in setting bias. The OP stated -3db bias. That’s not enough detail for me. It has to be -3dB overbias. You back off the bias until you reach a peak, then increase the bias until it it goes down 3dB. You can have -3dB overbias, or -3dB...

Back when I used to work in an 8 track studio, we used DBX. We would align each tape machine before every session. When it came time to bounce, we would get our mix, turn off the DBX & bounce without it. That signal was always encoded. When it got back to the 8 track, we’d turn the DBX back on &...

No, I Actually put the keyboard in the dishwasher. The funny thing is I’m a tech. When I saw how difficult if was to take the keyboard apart, I took someone’s advice (yeah on the Internet) I had already bought a replacement keyboard, so I had nothing to lose. The keyboard came out working...

Ribbon mics are great for accordion. You’ll probably need a Cloudlifter or a preamp that has 65-70dB of gain.

Seems to me I remember slamming cassettes that won’t play on a flat surface. I know you’ll all be skeptical, but when I spilled coffee on my old Apple keyboard, I put it in the dishwasher and it’s been working fine ever since. Of course YMMV.

I’ve seen some severe damage where batteries leak. My advice would be to clean it up as best as you can then run some wires where the traces go. The acid in the battery is a gift that keeps on giving. Over time it will eat away on the copper traces on the board. That’s why I advise to run wire...

I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic music lately. I enjoyed the song and the video just made it more interesting.

I’m not really up on Otari machines, but in my experience with tape machines in general, the motors don’t usually die. If anything, it’s the motor drive components that may be defective. Look for what driving the motor, check the electrolytics and transistors in the circuit. If I understand your...