Syncing reel-to-reel to Cubase; or the other way round

[wolkenvelden]

Dear tape heads,

I am about to purchase a Fostex R-8 8-tk reel-to-reel, and plan on sync'ing it to Cubase SX 3 on a PC. I'm assuming the best scenario is to have Cubase as the master and have the R8 chase the PC, so playback on Cubase stays constant and so I can bring in already recorded tracks into Cubase and still do dubs on the R8, before bringing everything into Cubase to mix.

The reasoning behind this is that having Cubase chase the R8 may cause inconsistency in the PC playback, thus messing up the sync of tracks being dubbed on the R8 or tracks being transferred into Cubase.

1) Am I correct in this reasoning? Or do you not expect any problems with having Cubase as the slave?

I might shell out for a Fostex 4030 to take care of this, and the 4035 remote that accompanies it. Two questions on this:

2) Do I absolutely need the 4035 for this scenario?
3) Can I do without the 4030 and/or 4035 and take care of this in a completely different way that I may have overlooked?

Bonus Q:

4) SPMTE or MTC?

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Full disclosure:

PC, 2.4 GHz Celeron, XP Pro, Cubase SX 3
Audiotrak MAYA1010 audio interface (PCI, 8 analog in, S/PDIF pair in, 8 an. out, S/PDIF out)
Fostex R8 8-track analog reel-to-reel recorder

I plan to run very little to zero MIDI instruments using this setup.

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Thanks in advance, guys!!!

 

[themaddog]

Hey there,
First and foremost, I think SMPTE is the way to go, but if there's another way, it'll probably work exactly the same.

In an ideal world, you'd actually want the reel to reel to be the master, because using random access the computer could sync up almost instantly to slave to the reel. But, this would require special syncronization between the Fostex 4030 (I'm assuming) and the computer, just as there will have to be some sort of special sync cable between both Fostex units.

You will need some kind of sync box, as well as specific cables, in order to get this thing to work. I've never used Fostex equipment, but I've used what I believe are the Tascam equivalents, which are the Tascam MSR-16 and TSR-8, and synced them with Cubase SE. The Tascam sync box in this case was the Tascm Midiizer, and the costly Accessory 2 cable.

Basically, I had to stripe snyc tracks to the computer and one of the reel to reels. Once this was accomplished, the computer was designated as the "master," because with the sync box, all the Tascams could do was slave to the computer. This is because there are no transport or "accessory" controls on the computers, which would relate the actual position of the Tascams to the computer. So, in order to get the reel to sync properly to the computer, I had to select a specific point in the computer's audio track (rather than "rewind") and play it for a few seconds while the reel to reel caught up.

This whole process can get very tedious, and I wouldn't recommend it for normal, multitrack use. Also, there is a lot of room for a lot to go wrong in this process, not to mention it's costly to get all the extra cables, sync box, etc. When I ran my own Midiizer, I got a weird kind of data noise all the time, which discontinued whenever I disconnected the Accessory 2 cable from the reel recorder.

You're probably better off getting a Fostex 16 track recorder, if your heart is set on Fostex, rather than trying to make a hybrid between an 8 track recorder and a computer. Just my two sense, but I can tell you from my own experience that I ended up mostly abandoning this frustrating process.

Best wishes,
-MD