should I buy this Tascam 38?

[cjacek]

I'm gonna order one brand new solenoid for the capstan, and try to clean up the brake solenoid and try to save it since it seemed to be at least partly functional.

Clean it first before buying a new solenoid. They get gummed up just from sitting idle.

 

[A Reel Person]

Yeah,...

I've found when tracking on my 38 that it's usually not a good idea to record through any sort of patchbay or mixer but rather just directly from your mic preamp or whatever to the tape deck.

but what if your mic preamp is in your mixer?

 

[A Reel Person]

Okay now, so maybe I misunderstood.

Regarding the solenoids, you take a look. If the rubber looks decent, you could go ahead and spray some lube in there, and it could do the trick. If the rubber is completely shot, it will be all gummy and cleaning it out is the only way to deal with it. You'll know it when you see it.

Yeah, give it an eyeball and try some lube first. Scope out the brakes and make absolutely they're releasing. If the reel table or hub spins sluggishly, there may be some looseness in the reel table setting to the motor shaft. For sluggish spinning in the hubs, there is also an electrical adjustment on the Control card. You could juice that thing up til there's no tomorrow, but I'd only recommend messing with those adjusments if you have a proper spring scale. The tension has to be set right, or you could destroy the heads and tape path with too much tension. A lack of back tension could mask a problem of too much forward tension, and vice versa. For instance, quite a few years ago my 38 had problems moving tape and sluggish rewind, and I eventually found that the tension adjustment had drifted so far, the tension was like 4 or 5 times what it should be, that the tape was just being tortured and dragged over the heads. I fixed it by adjusting the electronics and using a spring scale. There is a procedure in the book, of course. The book! Why didn't I think of that?!?!

 

[Hi_Flyer]

Minor comment, and not exactly related to your questions, but I've found when tracking on my 38 that it's usually not a good idea to record through any sort of patchbay or mixer but rather just directly from your mic preamp or whatever to the tape deck. Remember that everything matters in terms of noise and sound quality- cables, preamps, etc. So if you go direct in from a mic preamp, your signal chain consists of:

Microphone-->mic cable--->mic pre-->cable-->tape deck input

whereas just using one patchbay/mixer will bump it up to:

Microphone-->mic cable-->mic pre-->cable-->patchbay/mixer-->cable--->tape deck input.

This is a good way to double the noise added to your signal, and also unless you manage to get an incredibly transparent patchbay/mixer its output can sound significantly worse than the direct out from your preamp.

Cheers,
theo

well, my mixer (Mackie Onyx 1220) only has 4 channels with preamps and it has D-sub outputs that pretty much come straight off the preamps, the signal doesn't pass throough the channel strip at all. I was going to use the rest of the channels for monitoring back from the 38. Do you think I will have problems trying to do that? They are stereo channels, and they don't have built in preamps, i'm wondering if the signal coming out of the 38 will be strong enough??

I don't plan on doing extensive mixing on the board, or with the 38. mainly I plan on using the 38 as a front end for a DAW running Reaper and mixing ITB, so I think I can get by with limited monitoring capabilities (for now). I think I do need some more outboard preamps though, especially if I want to record more than 4 tracks at once, which I probably will need to do. I can always use my tascam 424 for a couple tom tracks, plus I have a rane MS-1b. I was toying with the idea of grabbing a Bellari RP220 or maybe a GT Brick, I would really like a nice REAL tube preamp to throw in the mix somewhere...

belts and stuff are on the way, hopefully next week we can try to run some tape...