Affordable quality patch cables for Tascam 38 and M-512?

[christiandaelemans]

Recommend me some affordable nice quality patch cables for a tascam 38 and a tascam m-512​

hey all. so, it’s finally be realized! the next level of my home recording adventure, a tascam 38 and a big old tascam m-512 board. however, one very important component remains. the patch cables!!!

does anyone know of some relatively affordable, nice quality ts-rca 8 channel snake cables? if i went with the patch bay route, i’d need 4 in total…. i believe. 2 for the each side of the ins, and 2 for each side of the outs. i’ve found hosa brand cables, but i’ve heard of those just straight up dying on people. and a single channel dead on a snake means a snake that i have to replace entirely.

and would you recommend the use of a patchbay to make connections more easy? as far as i know, patch bays allow the rca pins to always be connected into the machines, and i can just repatch and do all of the switching around on the TS end of the cable with the patchbay. this is ideal, because i don’t wanna be undoing those finicky rca connections on the old tascam units.

bonus!! here’s a picture from the new state of my room. it looks a hell of a lot different than it did a month ago.

 

[christiandaelemans]

also, this is unrelated, but how fragile are 38s? because i was moving it yesterday and i bumped it into my desk thinking the desk wasn’t where it actually was, so imagine the force you’d bring down the unit except it hits a wooden surface along the way. should i be worried about the possibility i disrupted something internally? channel cards and the like. just been thinking about it since that happened, and i guess i can’t know until i get all my cables. VU meters still jump when i turn it on.

 

[rob aylestone]

Built like battleships. If you do get a problem, it would probably just require a reseating of an internal plug, assuming it was already dangling on a teeny bit of connection. It will be fine. My 34 has been constantly bumped around.

I tend to think you've done the right thing in using the patch feeding the recorded to it permanently, then connecting every other piece of kit and you can patch as required. The only thing is normalling, if you don't yet have the patchbay. Set it up so it works on your day to day setup with NO cables in it. I'm thinking inputs from tape come in top row 1-8, but the 1-8 mixer channels (if that's how you like to work) get fed from bottom row 1-8 - so with normalling, your tape channels always come up on 1-8. Patching lets them go somewhere else. Draw it on paper and see if it works.

Cable wise, for unbalanced connections I tend to buy from a UK company CPC-Farnell, and I guess they're all chinese, but they are tough and work. Same with the patchbay patch cables. Just buy enough. They always get lost and broken, so expensive ones are pointless. Amazon do perfectly decent ones too for jack to RCA.

This kind of thing
CPC link

 

[TalismanRich]

ProCo makes an 8 channel TS to RCA snake. No molded plugs, so it should be easily repairable if you screw up badly.

 

[ecc83]

Built like battleships. If you do get a problem, it would probably just require a reseating of an internal plug, assuming it was already dangling on a teeny bit of connection. It will be fine. My 34 has been constantly bumped around.

I tend to think you've done the right thing in using the patch feeding the recorded to it permanently, then connecting every other piece of kit and you can patch as required. The only thing is normalling, if you don't yet have the patchbay. Set it up so it works on your day to day setup with NO cables in it. I'm thinking inputs from tape come in top row 1-8, but the 1-8 mixer channels (if that's how you like to work) get fed from bottom row 1-8 - so with normalling, your tape channels always come up on 1-8. Patching lets them go somewhere else. Draw it on paper and see if it works.

Cable wise, for unbalanced connections I tend to buy from a UK company CPC-Farnell, and I guess they're all chinese, but they are tough and work. Same with the patchbay patch cables. Just buy enough. They always get lost and broken, so expensive ones are pointless. Amazon do perfectly decent ones too for jack to RCA.

This kind of thing
CPC link

Wow! Rob wow, just think how long it would take you to make up that set of cables? Even in my prime most of a working day. I gave up making cables a few years ago. I still fix things or make 'specials' but for even quite 'off the wall' combinations the cables are around and SO cheap.

Dave.

 

[RFR]

You can just get HOSA cables. They’re color coded (nice) and despite having molded plugs they’re very durable. Especially in your situation using a patchbay, you plug them in once and forget about them.

As Rob stated in an earlier post make sure you get a normalized bay.

I’m using older Furman bays, and of course in keeping with the theme, Tascam PB series bays.

I like the Tascam because they’re in banks of 16, which is great for I/O with an 8 or 16 track setup. The Furman is a bank of 20.

Both are normalized

 

[RRuskin]

I've used HOSA cables and have had no problems with them. They pass signal without high frequency loss and are very robust. FYI - I think you've underestimated the number of cables you'll need. And do yourself a favor by laying your 38 on it's back. The capstan bearing will last longer and cleaning and editing are much easier.

 

[RFR]

4 hosa snakes and one 16 I/O patch-bay would get you started.

 

[ecc83]

Just to get tekky/pedantic for a mo' Rick, cables do not in themselves 'cause' HF loss.
That this can happen is obviously true but it is a consequence of the device driving the cable having too high an output resistance*. This is really not a problem these days and you are very unlikely to find gear with an 0P R of 1k Ohms and most likely around 100 Ohms.

Really the only situation where HF loss is likely is with a passive electric guitar and quite a long cable but even here, with the guitar's volume pot at max there will be little loss. The relationship between a guitar's electronics and the cable/amp input is a complex one and not just HF chop AKA "tone suck.

*"resistance" because that is almost all it is, not an "impedance" in fact it is likely an actual, physical resistor of 68 to 120 Ohms in most cases.

FYI: Even with a source R of 1k and 1000 pf of cable (ball park 10m of most cable) the turnover frequency, i.e 3dB point is way up there are 160kHz! Plainly in a complex system this loss can be cumulative but even so you would need a heck of a lot of cable for the droop to intrude into the audible range. Since most kit will be a tenth that OPR we can pretty much ignore cable capacitance.

Dave.

 

[rob aylestone]

I've lots of the moulded types and oddly the only thing that happened is the colour coding ring fell off two! My method with patch bays is to ONLY use moulded cables because they get abused, and if they're cheap, if one does start to crackle, you bin it!

 

[RRuskin]

Just to get tekky/pedantic for a mo' Rick, cables do not in themselves 'cause' HF loss.
That this can happen is obviously true but it is a consequence of the device driving the cable having too high an output resistance*. This is really not a problem these days and you are very unlikely to find gear with an 0P R of 1k Ohms and most likely around 100 Ohms.

Really the only situation where HF loss is likely is with a passive electric guitar and quite a long cable but even here, with the guitar's volume pot at max there will be little loss. The relationship between a guitar's electronics and the cable/amp input is a complex one and not just HF chop AKA "tone suck.

*"resistance" because that is almost all it is, not an "impedance" in fact it is likely an actual, physical resistor of 68 to 120 Ohms in most cases.

FYI: Even with a source R of 1k and 1000 pf of cable (ball park 10m of most cable) the turnover frequency, i.e 3dB point is way up there are 160kHz! Plainly in a complex system this loss can be cumulative but even so you would need a heck of a lot of cable for the droop to intrude into the audible range. Since most kit will be a tenth that OPR we can pretty much ignore cable capacitance.

Dave.

I was always told that it was high capacitance that caused hi frequency loss. The original TASCAM LO-CAP cable made a significant improvement over typical hi-fi shop/Radio Shack interconnects. HOSA was Fostex's answer to Tascam's cable and proved to be a worthy competitor.

 

[sweetbeats]

I’ve had and used a LOT of the standard HOSA snakes, RCA -> RCA, RCA -> TS, TS -> TS…a lot of them, and almost never had a problem with anything on any of them. Yes the molded plugs are a pain if you do have trouble with anything…they will never compete with a custom snake made with Neutrik or Switchcraft plus and Gepco or whatever bulk multi-channel cable you want to use, but they perform well and will save you a lot of money over having somebody make the custom snakes or the the time it will take you to solder them up. I don’t consider the capacitance issue at play here with line level audio and the short runs one typically maintains for unbalanced audio. Yes if we’re talking mic level and a 100’ or more I would definitely care about capacitance, but the HOSA snakes get the job done for anything under 25’. My 2 pence.

 

[ecc83]

I was always told that it was high capacitance that caused hi frequency loss. The original TASCAM LO-CAP cable made a significant improvement over typical hi-fi shop/Radio Shack interconnects. HOSA was Fostex's answer to Tascam's cable and proved to be a worthy competitor.

Well, it is a bit of a subtle concept...ALL cables have capacitance (and resistance and inductance but these are usually so low they can be ignored in most cases) Back decades when audio gear had "600 Ohm" Cathode follower line outs, nobody gave cable HF loss a second thought even for 100s of mtr runs. Domestic gear was different, and extra valve stage was expensive! But really all people had was a turntable and a pre amp and the cable could not be more than a mtr or else you would get hum and the capacitance would screw the cartridge response (still NOT a simple HF loss) Indeed, cartridge* makers would specify the capacitance their product should be loaded with for the flattest response. N.B. Too LITTLE C could be as bad as too much!

The world turned and we had OR and cassette machines and these needed connecting but until the advent of the op amp, transistor gear still had a relatively high output resistance, much of it due to either pennypinching or bad design.
These days, with the exception of the passive electric guitar, cable capacitance should have no impact on the HF performance of even the most modest of kit.

*Budget decks used a ceramic cartridge but in their case cable capacitance did not affect HF, since the cartridges were in effect capacitors, higher C cable just gave a full bandwidth signal loss. Some might remember the coming of the "DIN" connection regime? This worked very well and cables could be any reasonable length without affecting the response. The problem was, much of the rest of the world did not really understand it and some pretty dire setups resulted!

Dave.