Mixdown distortion-HELP!

[Dave Zippi]

I am currently mixing a country instrumental I wrote & recorded on a Tascam 4-track Reel-to-Reel that I recorded at 15 ips. The piece has 2 rhythm guitars, bass, a drum machine & a Fender stratocaster which is the lead instrument. It has plenty of bite & is a little bright. My problem is one that I've had in the past yet have never solved. The mix sounds great when played back on my Reel-to-Reel. It sounds great from the cassette that it's mixed down to on my Tascam 130 mixdown deck when playing it back on that deck. It sounds great on my home stereo as well as my friends'. Yet the lead guitar will distort or break up on the higher notes when the same mix is played on certain cassette decks like some car stereos & boom boxes. I know that these decks are lower in quality but why does only the lead guitar break up & not the other instruments? What am I doing wrong? What do others do who are more knowledgable than I to eliminate this problem?
Thanks!! Dave Zippi

 

[sonusman]

Sounds like a biasing problem on one of the tape decks. Could actually be any of them that is causing this. With tape machines, you need to make sure that the machines are in tip top condition to assure faithfull playback. If the problem is in the certain 'other' decks, well, not much you can do there. Why not try using some digital.... .....LOL....but don't get me started here. I am a digital animal and tend to argue in it's favore quite a bit. But on thing is for sure, a CD is not going to sound very much different from one player to another.

Good luck.

Ed Rei
Echo Star Studio www.echostarstudio.com

 

[Dragon]

Could easily be simply that you're hitting a particular resonant frequency on these low-fi players that makes them distort...maybe a lot of audio energy in a certain band. If you ran it into a sound card to your computer, and looked at the waveform, you might see spikes in those areas.