Estate sale treasure!

[Dr ZEE]

now, heh heh lol, remember guys, you are talking here with a guy who is just about to score an AG440c for stinkin' fifty bucks plus he got 32 and bunch of other crap for free ...grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ...he's the guy to "hate"
*************

..opinion on the unbalanced line length

I don't know. I have no opinion ... all my cables are 6-12 ft max (except mic cable ...15-20 ft) .... so I never had to deal with long cables and really have no experience with dealing with problems simply because I never had any problems ... actually the only balanced connection in my set-up in action was(is) between mixer main out and CD-Recorder (when I use it), (and DAT machine which I don't use any more)
so what do I know. I'd say ...guessing, 12 ft is safe... longer? I have no idea, really

 

[Dr ZEE]

Rick .... when you get the beast to your place, update us with a couple of picts!

YEH! Rick, you owe us a strike-a-pose now

 

[FALKEN]

rick-

I have just reached my breaking point with unbalanced lines. anything over 12-15 feet total is trouble. and this is almost unavoidable when you use a patch bay. I am going to either have to try some "pseudo" balanced- adaptor cables and if that doesn't work I will have to get some transformers to balance everything. There are also some ready-made products. YMMV, of course.

 

[arjoll]

I am going to either have to try some "pseudo" balanced- adaptor cables and if that doesn't work I will have to get some transformers to balance everything. There are also some ready-made products. YMMV, of course.

If you're comfortable with electronics you can go unbalanced to balanced with two op-amps, and back to unbalanced with a single op-amp.

 

[FALKEN]

no, I'm not exactly confortable working with electricity yet. -only guitar circuits for now. But I think there might be enough room to put some transformer balanced inputs and outputs into my tascam 32. if not I was thinking a small box set right next to it.

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Rick,

First off, congrats on the estate sale score!

It's amazing what people will sell stuff for when they have no idea what that stuff is.

About the cable length issue; 30 feet is supposed to be the theoretical limit on unbalanced lines, all that based on cable construction design regarding shielding and resistance from line loss. The 30 foot "standard" was something TASCAM used to talk about in their manuals from 20 - 30 years ago. Cable quality has gone way up since those good old days and so long as you deal with good grade cables from Canare, Belden and a bevy of other well known names, I don't see a problem. I currently run lines that are 26 feet long from the mixer to the patch bay and then on to the 16 track and have never had a weak/RFI plagued signal issue. Never.

And besides all of that, considering the layout of the room, I don't see anywhere else you could put the recorders? It seems awfully tight in there?

Cheers!

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

Hey Ghost, thanks for the reply. Ok, thats great news. I'm buying some bulk Mogami snake from frederic(if he has some left after wiring his mega channel console ) This only leaves the issue of the bar meters in the mixer matching the VU reading on the MSR's and the Ampex. I know I read about this sometime, but I must be suffering from Alzhiemers or something. How do you do this? I mean, isn't it Unity Gain that you have to set or something. God its been too long since I've been able to record, I think I forgot how to put the tape on the machines Anyway, thanks again Ghost.

 

[The Ghost of FM]

For monitoring the levels on your tape machines you might try making use of a small security camera positioned to face the meters and take a simple 75ohm video line signal back to the control room and plug that into a smaller 15" LCD TV that's off to the side and not blocking your speaker's sound field.

I used to do this same technique in my live room to monitor the talent to see if they were positioned properly to the microphone. I made use of an old broken camcorder that had a bad transport and fed it to a smaller 5" portable TV that was small enough to put on top of the mixer's meter bridge.

Cheers!

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

Ok Ghost. But I'm a little confused. Arn't the mixer level output meters (8 buss and stereo outs) and tape machine levels supposed to show the same VU levels? There are NO input level controls on an MXR so I don't know how or what would be the point of different level readings But thats a great idea about the tape monitoring camera. I think I have the stuff to do that. Cool, thats just what I needed Ghost! Thanks again.

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

Hey falken, thanks for your input. I KNOW my old hosa cables are noisy. But I'm getting some mogami, and really, for my purpose, I'll just have to live with the decision for using long cables regardless. Otherwise, the option is taking up what little space I have. Thanks again though.

 

[FALKEN]

As long as you are going to make your own cables, if your console is balanced, you should look into this:

http://www.jensen-transformers.com/an/an003.pdf

# 2.1. I haven't tried it yet but I suspect it might work.

as for the different gear showing the same levels; they should if they are both referenced to the same operating level. which they may or may not be. your tascam 32 has input and output controls...so you would send a tone into your mixer and get the it to read 0, from there send the signal to the 32, and set its input to read zero. I don't know how you would do it without input controls. I think you might be able to calibrate the whole deck to whatever level is coming out of the mixer when it is reading zero, but don't quote me on that because I don't know for sure.

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Ok Ghost. But I'm a little confused. Arn't the mixer level output meters (8 buss and stereo outs) and tape machine levels supposed to show the same VU levels? There are NO input level controls on an MXR so I don't know how or what would be the point of different level readings But thats a great idea about the tape monitoring camera. I think I have the stuff to do that. Cool, thats just what I needed Ghost! Thanks again.

Rick,

Usually the VU level indicators are never the same on the 16 track and the mixer because the noise reduction, (especially if it's dbx), will always make the tape's levels look low when they may be just fine.

As for decks running no noise reduction and are properly calibrated, there shouldn't be much need to worry about any level differences between what the mixer says versus the tape's meters. The important thing is not to under or overload the tape and the cam idea can work well for keeping an eye on that as well as knowing if a tape has been chewed or the machine is on fire.

Cheers!

 

[arjoll]

Cable quality has gone way up since those good old days and so long as you deal with good grade cables from Canare, Belden and a bevy of other well known names, I don't see a problem.

I recently grabbed some really nice Proel unbalanced cable - they've got some nice, but relatively inexpensive, cable.

(Just don't buy the made up ones, they seem to have a QC problem at the moment)