Otari Mtr 90 mk3 Tape Calibration with Trident 78

AllenM

Member
Hello,

I am in the process of calibrating my Otari MTr 90 mkiii with ATR tape +6.
Ive done the procedure via Chris Maras tape cal APP and I have this issue:

I am in input monitor on the tape machine and I see two signals on two line inputs on my console. 1 - a synth 2- kick drum.

the synth is hitting 0 on the Led channel meter and the kick is hitting +1, 0, -3 on the Led channel meter.

I look over to my tape machine on input mode and noticed that the VU meter on the synth is hitting 0vu to -3 and the kick drum is hitting -6,-7.

Why is it when I look at the kick drum on my channel LED it’s hitting +1,0,-3 and then when I look at the tape machine VU it’s actually -6,-3?

I have plugged in protools signal generator to hit the “test input” Jack on the otari which sends that tone generator to all the channels. On the VUs 1-24 they all = 0vu when I send 1k, 10k.

I don’t have proper test equipment. I used protools tone generator. I am starting to think I should buy a minirator physical tone generator ($400) because I just want to do this the right way.
Any guidance is appreciated.
 
My hunch is the Trident meters are peaking type, and the Otari meters are averaging type. If you’ve calibrated the meters on both sides I wouldn’t worry about the level differences between the two devices and different source material. If it was me, to sort this out I’d do a test pass monitoring the play head while setting levels and ignore the meters and set the level to the Otari using my ears...push until it got a little crunchy and then back it off until it sounded how I wanted...the two sources in question are very different in terms of their spectral energy. After doing the above then I’d look at the meters for future reference. Something like that.
 
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