Life expectancy of heads ??

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herringscales

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Hello...
In my pursuit of a used Tascam 8 track analog recorder (Tascam 688), I've come across notes in item descriptions about the heads. "Heads were replaced"..."Sent back to Tascam for head cleaning"..."Heads have 300 hours on them"...etc...etc...etc...Can anyone decipher all this for me? I know heads should be cleaned after every use...but that's about all I know...

How many hours of life do heads have?
Can they be replaced if they die?
Does this cost tons of money to replace?
What's a reasonable amount of hours for a used unit?
Anything else I should be on the lookout for?

Thanks
Scott
 
Good question,I have 4 cassette multitrack tascams. I hope someone can shed some light on this
 
herringscales

I'll take your questions in order and keep my replies as brief as possible:

1. About two and a half minutes.
2. Very rarely.
3. Yes.
4. If you have to ask, it's too late.
5. Viagra.
 
My 424MKII has 4 years of fairly heavy use on it and is still pumping. I think I cleaned it about 4 or 5 times within that period. The heads are all good, far as I know. It still records and sounds like new. I think the big thing is to not use metal tapes in it. From what I was told by TEAC, metal tapes are what leads to head damage and excessive wear.
All Iknow is mine still works fine, I just gave it to my bass player to use cause I have my PC DAW up and running!
SEEYA
 
Hard2hear,Teac said that? In what context? I mean how did that come up.Was it a concern of yours and you decided to call them? I can't believe you cleaned the heads so little. That speaks volumes about how tough they are.I'm a fanatic about cleaning them. I had a friend who had some tascam decks and he would smoke and drop ashes all over his 688 and not think twice about it.I guess it had an effect on me
 
Uhm. ALL tapes are metal...
Its the metal that makes them magnetic.
 
no no no, those tapes that are the METAL type tapes. Not type I or type II but the METAL. I used to see them around alot but not so much lately. I don't know, I'm just going off what the support guy told me a long time ago. When I first bought my 424 I had no idea what I was doing and I thought it wasw broken so I ended up talking to support and that was something the guy said when telling me tips and stuff. It was a few years ago.
 
Hmmm. Now when you say it I have some faint reminder of a third tape type, not ferro and not chrome. Was it called "metal"? Man, that was stupid. Iron and chrome are metals too. Geez...
 
I don't know what I'll do now,I bought about 50 new tapes from a closeout store here in NJ called "oddjob" and only paid 69 cents each for them.25 are BASF MPIV Studio position metal the others are Basf TypeII. I'll guess I'll use the metal ones for one pass mixes I guess,I feel funny about useing them in my portastudios,That sucks because they sound great
 
A head usually lasts about as long as a body. An exception would be Ichabod Crane.
 
Who let you out of the cave.You didn't even have the courtesy to bring beer
 
At one time, there were 4 cassette tape formulations available: normal(type I), chrome(type II), fe(type 3), and metal(type 4). At WAL-MART or BEST BUY you will only find type I or II. If you look hard, you can still find type 4.

Never use type I for anything but a scratch pad. Tape is manufactured by adhering a layer of ferrous oxide to a ribbon of a plastic material (I think it used to be acetate). As you increment through the tape types, the higher the amount of ferric material that is bonded to the backing material. Because of the lesser amount of "metal" in the type I tapes, they tend to saturate very rapidly, and your recordings will be distorted and deficient at high frequencies.

Type II is fine, and that is what manufacturers (like Tascam) recommend and bias their decks for.

Metal(type 4) tape will give even better results, and I use it often, though not all the time, primarily because of price/availability. With the superhard materials heads are now made of, though it may be a valid argument that type 4 will cause greater wear to the head, I haven't had any trouble.

If I could find "metal" tapes for 69 cents, I'd use them all the time.

Twist
 
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