syncing a TSR8 and a DAW

[kensington]

hi, Has anyone tried syncing a Yamaha AW2816 (or other) work station to a Tascam Tsr8? I am definitely a midi-idiot. I got a JL cooper pps-2 to sync a drum machine to my reel to reel; so I thought I'd try it on the Yamaha........doesn't seem to work. Is this possible with the pps-2 or would I need something like the mts-1000? The most reaction I got from the Yammy was intermitant play....skipping and lurching and wobbly sound.......and this was striping the tape with smpte tone, not fisk......fisk gives me nothing at all. Can anyone shed any light? thanks kk

If this is possible, how do you do it?....step...by....step.

 

[Raw-Tracks]

I took a quick glance at the AW2816 manual and it is not 100% clear. There is a section where they explain how to sync two AW2816's via MTC. So it seems it's possible that you should be able to use your PPS-2 to convert SMPTE from a track on your tape machine to drive your AW2816. You need to make sure your AW2816 is set to slave to MTC. Did you set it to slave?

 

[kensington]

daw/TRS

Yes, I did set it to slave....and every other thing I could think of.

 

[kensington]

syncing daw & tsr8

hello there, Just wanted to let interested parties know you can sync a Yamaha AW2816 and a Tascam TSR8 using a JL Cooper pps-2. I finally dood it, with the help of some online personalities. The one main (wrong) thing I was doing was recording the generated tone too low on the tape. I plugged the SYNC OUT cable directly into the tsr8 input (at -10db) and it just wasn't strong enuff. So I ran it thru my mixer (defeat eq) and cranked it a bit.....now it's smooth sailin'. 23 tracks in sync! Great! You probably will have to adjust the "offset" feature on the yammy's song setting page, but then your good to go. later kk

 

[Raw-Tracks]

At what level had you been printing the timecode? And at what level did you wind up at? ALso make sure to degeat any Noise Reduction ont he channel you are printing the time code to, if that is possible.

 

[themaddog]

With an MTS-1000 you can sync any TSR or MSR to anything. But, the TSR or MSR has to be the slave, which can be a little bit of a pain. You have to also have an accessory 2 cable.

-MD

 

[jpmorris]

The MMC100 will also allow the TSR-8 to be locked to an external source, although you seem to have cracked it now anyway.

Depending on the quality of the timecode unit, you may or may not be able to put the tone through noise reduction. The Philip Rees box I have is very good at this, although it will tend to flake out if you encode with DBX off and then decode with DBX on. I usually lay the sync track just below 0.. I've never had any audible crosstalk from the sync tone, but be aware that putting something
loud on track 7 may disrupt the timecode, especially when recording track 7, but also on playback if you've really, really overdone it. Usually you can recover from this situation by tweaking the input gain on the sync box though.

Noise reduction can be defeated on track 8 by use of the 'Sync Lock' button. But make sure you record it AND play it back with Sync Lock enabled.

 

[kensington]

I forgot to mention I had to make the TSR8 the master, as the pps-2 is not capable of accessing the TSR8's motor capabilities. I guess the mts-1000 is. And yes, the TSR8 does have a special 8th track sync button to defeat noise reduction. As far as the input levels for the pps-2 sync striping tone.....I just relied on the led level meter on the front of the tape deck. The initial striping, as recommended, was run direct from sync box/out to direct input 8 on the back of the tsr8. This resulted in the led meter reading at about -3 or the 6th bar (maybe 5th) The second striping I ran thru the mixer and brought it up to +1 or the 9th bar.
The 8th track level switch on the back was set at -10db throughout.

Yeah, keep Marianne Faithful on the 7th track......she's a very quiet singer you see..........anyway.....there's some interesting comments on this subject on the other tascam forum (not the one listed here) under analog. I posted the same initial question over there. Nick Boyd's comments in particular....(were actually rather distressing......sobering). But, it's good to know these things. I've yet to try and test the various advice. thanks for the feedback. kk