There is hope my good friend (DR-550 Backup!!)
Check it out!!! I've owned my DR-550 for about 15 years - and have faithfully kept it plugged in and swapping batteries for the past 10 - since I don't have a cassette tape recorder any longer.
Continued... (the plot thickens...)
Recently I decided that I had shelved my talents for long enough, broke down and got myself a Tascam DP-01fx 8 Track hard disk recorder. In searching for some information on folks that had made "digital" backups I came across your thread. Your results did nothing for my confidence - but I'm hard headed and decided to have a go at it anyways. I figured that if I watched the input levels - and got them as high as possible without having any clipping - I'd be OK. To make a long story short - I was able to pull it off on the 2nd try.
Hook up is as follows:
1) 1/8" (.125 for you engineer types) mono plug into the save/load jack on
the DR-550
2) Other end to a 1/4" (.250) mono plug into one of the inputs on the HDR
3) Assign and Arm the track you want to record on - (named the song DR550_BU) to the jacked input.
4) Start the "Save" process on the DR-550 and adjust the gain on the HDR's input until you get a nice high level - again - without any clipping!! Distortion is only good when you are slapping it on a guitar signal!!
5) After you get your settings nailed down - stop the recording on the HDR and erase/clean/wipe the track and start the save process over with the good settings.
6) After you get done with the save - do a verify by hooking a 1/4" (.250) Stereo to 1/8" (.125) mono into your HDR's headphone jack and the other end to the DR-550's save/load jack.
7) You might have to adjust the level of the head phones - I started out fully muted and then opened it up gradually so as not to hammer the DR-550's save/load jack - until you get a good verify. After a successful verify - I would recommend taking a listen to the signal that is going to
the DR-550 using a pair of headphones - so you can get an idea of how low you can run it - wouldn't want to fry the circuit by over driving it too much. See?
8) Go have a brew!!! You now have a digital backup of your drum setup - and unlike analog (cassette tape) backups - it should never ever go bad from magnetics getting old/weak. Yeahhhh!!!
Have a good one!
~Stinky