The Ghost of FM
Banned
I strongly believe in the saying; "You get what you pay for."
If you bought a TASCAM narrower then professional industry standard track width and speed recorder, don't expect it to perform and honestly compete with the machines that did. If you do that, you're playin' yo' self and nobody else.
Yes, with dbx noise reduction, they will offer up competitive specs in adjacent channel crosstalk and better signal to noise specs because of the noise reduction process but, if you turned the dbx off, you would quickly discover you have exactly what you payed for and that is a semi-professional machine that will hiss like a fucker, overload easily because there's half the headroom on the tape and in the electronics which were built to fit a budget first and foremost and that's exactly why a brand new 16 track one inch TASCAM, (my machine) sold for 10 grand new and the real pro machines like Studer, MCI, Scully and Ampex were retailing for 10 times that much because they were built like tanks, not Toyota Corolas.
Is dbx noise reduction a perfect technology? No it is not. It's added steps of processing definitely take away from the detail and natural dynamics of the original performance but, for a given, less then state of the art budget, they are a really good shortcut to better overall numbers on the spec sheets. In short, their benefits outweigh their drawbacks.
Is it fair to call the TASCAMs crap? Absolutely not because they were never designed to be true piers to the other names I have mentioned. They were designed to be snapped up by home recordists and lower budget professional facilities that were doing demo projects and some lower budget audio sweetening work for video productions and nothing more. If you had the older magazines of the day from when they were new in the 80's you'd see it right in their ads that these were the clients they were pitching themselves to.
Real state of the art analog costs major bucks and you can't truly cut too many corners at the top end of that art and still realistically claim you own the best there is.
While Uli may not give those caveats before his diatribes on his site, there is some truth there if you peel away enough layers of bullshit and mis-information.
Cheers!
If you bought a TASCAM narrower then professional industry standard track width and speed recorder, don't expect it to perform and honestly compete with the machines that did. If you do that, you're playin' yo' self and nobody else.
Yes, with dbx noise reduction, they will offer up competitive specs in adjacent channel crosstalk and better signal to noise specs because of the noise reduction process but, if you turned the dbx off, you would quickly discover you have exactly what you payed for and that is a semi-professional machine that will hiss like a fucker, overload easily because there's half the headroom on the tape and in the electronics which were built to fit a budget first and foremost and that's exactly why a brand new 16 track one inch TASCAM, (my machine) sold for 10 grand new and the real pro machines like Studer, MCI, Scully and Ampex were retailing for 10 times that much because they were built like tanks, not Toyota Corolas.
Is dbx noise reduction a perfect technology? No it is not. It's added steps of processing definitely take away from the detail and natural dynamics of the original performance but, for a given, less then state of the art budget, they are a really good shortcut to better overall numbers on the spec sheets. In short, their benefits outweigh their drawbacks.
Is it fair to call the TASCAMs crap? Absolutely not because they were never designed to be true piers to the other names I have mentioned. They were designed to be snapped up by home recordists and lower budget professional facilities that were doing demo projects and some lower budget audio sweetening work for video productions and nothing more. If you had the older magazines of the day from when they were new in the 80's you'd see it right in their ads that these were the clients they were pitching themselves to.
Real state of the art analog costs major bucks and you can't truly cut too many corners at the top end of that art and still realistically claim you own the best there is.
While Uli may not give those caveats before his diatribes on his site, there is some truth there if you peel away enough layers of bullshit and mis-information.
Cheers!
