Tascam M30 and a TEAC 2300S into DAW?

[Playingdumb]

Hey folks,

tape newb here. I picked up a TEAC 2300S on a whim (in the shop being resurrected), to bounce stems and tracks to from my DAW to give them that “you know what”. It’s only two tracks, so not much of a recorder. Then I figured why not flush out my interface with a M30 to get the preamps on the way in to digital too. Am I going to regret not having at least a four track recorder? (No you can’t judge my regret threshold, but I just need some advice)

I was thinking I could also record through the m30 in to the TEAC and then send the out of the TEAC to my DAW. Accounting for latency from the heads shouldn’t be a nightmare (right?)

Honestly I’m just having trouble visualizing everything without the hardware right in front of me, but once it’s in front of me it’ll be too late to change. (Without having to sell and buy new gear.)

I’m set on the M30 (paying 900 CAD, not a steal of a deal, but it’s working) but just wondering what I’m not thinking of, essentially I’m a grown man who feels like he needs an adult.

 

[sweetbeats]

A 2300 is not the machine you want if you want to run stems from the DAW back to the DAW. It is a two track machine. You will never in your ever loving life get things to line up quite right back in the DAW if you are doing it two tracks at a time using a machine that doesn’t do sync. I guess you could purchase some additional hardware and slave the DAW and use one of your two tracks as a sync track, but then you’re doing it one track at a time. Maddening. Even at two tracks at a time decoding on the project size. And sure you could try to calculate the time delay between the record and reproduce head, setup a delay in the DAW to try and get things to line up when monitoring for overdubs and build a project two tracks a time through the 2300, but this also would be a challenging exercise. Your music would suffer because you’d be distracted with the gear and difficult process. The only way I’d use that machine is to experiment with doing tape-based master recordings. It is not at all the right kind of machine for what you are thinking of doing. How many tracks are your typical DAW projects? Ideally you want a tape machine with that many tracks if you are going to track and dump or “warm up” stems.

$900CDN for an M30. I’m still taking that in. That seems like a lot for an M30 but a quick search reveals that’s somewhat the market…which I can’t understand. But I guess it is what it is. I’m not trying to be a rain cloud…like, if an M30 is what you wanted, then you’re happy with it. I’m not saying it’s a bad mixer. I’m just surprised at the market range for such a device these days. I recently paid $150 for a vintage 8x4x2 console with a dedicated monitor buss, 3 band sweep EQ, in-line configurable monitoring…and a really nice aesthetic…100mm faders…not Teac/Tascam…I’m leaving the brand/model out of this because it’s something people trash on, but I think the kernel must be people that don’t look beneath the skin and don’t know how to properly gain stage to minimize noise…and the lore begins. I bought it after getting ahold of the schematics and I think it’s a total sleeper…I think it was unpopular enough people just never bothered to actually consider it…5532 based signal path…huge coupling capacitors and lots of the coupling caps are non-polar which means the signal path was carefully designed and forward-biased so the more expensive sonically better non-polar parts could be used…+/-18V power supply for better headroom…I think I know what it is that is maybe an Achilles heel but it’s super easy to resolve. And then I get it and open it up and I was shocked…way overbuilt compared to anything similar in a Teac or Tascam console, but this was, in its day, in the same market bracket…all glass fiber PCBs, huge power supply heat sink with proper venting. Like, I’m impressed with the build. Heavy-gauge steel for panels…$150. So my opinion is skewed.

 

[Playingdumb]

thanks so much for your reply. All fair points. Yes the balance of taking advantage of the sound, but not letting it become a nightmare is really a needle threading.

What if then, since tracking and dubbing each track as I go would be a huge handicap, and buzz kill, I instead recorded into my DAW, via the M30 to get advantage of those preamps, then when I’m happy with the tune, I bounce each track one at a time to the 2300 and back into the daw. (I can send back out the recorded audio simultaneously there’s just a little delay as you know) Theoretically the delay would be the same on each track so long as I start from the beginning each time, the returned “tape” tracks would be offset from the daw recording ones all by the same amount and be in synch with each other.

Thoughts?

 

[RRuskin]

thanks so much for your reply. All fair points. Yes the balance of taking advantage of the sound, but not letting it become a nightmare is really a needle threading.

What if then, since tracking and dubbing each track as I go would be a huge handicap, and buzz kill, I instead recorded into my DAW, via the M30 to get advantage of those preamps, then when I’m happy with the tune, I bounce each track one at a time to the 2300 and back into the daw. (I can send back out the recorded audio simultaneously there’s just a little delay as you know) Theoretically the delay would be the same on each track so long as I start from the beginning each time, the returned “tape” tracks would be offset from the daw recording ones all by the same amount and be in synch with each other.

Thoughts?

The M30 was pretty good in it's day in many respects but the mic pres left a lot to be desired if one wanted clean, detailed sound with good transient response. Chances are the ones in your current interface perform better. Even the TASCAM techs acknowledged that. If you want analog tape "mojo," no machine other than perhaps a NAGRA will give you that @ 7.5ips.

 

[sweetbeats]

Yes you could play back your project and route two tracks at a time through the 2300S and monitor in real time off the play head while recording, and record those to a new pair of tracks, and keep doing that until all tracks have done the round trip through the tape machine, and it would work probably okay, but take care to transfer any tracks with coincident material at the same time, like for instance a stereo set of tracks, or a mic that might have bleed from something else. If you don’t, because of the slower tape speed of the 2300S and the less sophisticated transport, there will be greater possibilities for slight changes in speed during the process cycle to cycle. Those minor differences will result in phase distortion between tracks of coincident material transferred during different cycles. If you’ve got anything that involved more than two tracks tracked simultaneously, like a mic’ed up drum kit, expect its not going to sound right or the same after the transfer. You’d have the potential for this issue regardless of the tape machine, it’s just minimized the higher the quality of the transport, and essentially mitigated if you have the DAW and tape machine synchronized. The 2300S is a consumer level machine, and as far as the transport, not sophisticated. And that brings me to RRuskin’s point…I’m not sure what you are after exactly with what you want to do, but the 2300S is not a mastering machine. It’s quarter-track stereo, so tracks are about half as wide as a halftrack 1/4” master recorder. And the 7.5ips tape speed is half the most common mastering speed of 15ips. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try it. You may love it. I just think it’s important to have reasonable expectations.

I’ll repeat my earlier question: how many tracks are typical with your DAW projects?

 

[TalismanRich]

thanks so much for your reply. All fair points. Yes the balance of taking advantage of the sound, but not letting it become a nightmare is really a needle threading.

What if then, since tracking and dubbing each track as I go would be a huge handicap, and buzz kill, I instead recorded into my DAW, via the M30 to get advantage of those preamps, then when I’m happy with the tune, I bounce each track one at a time to the 2300 and back into the daw. (I can send back out the recorded audio simultaneously there’s just a little delay as you know) Theoretically the delay would be the same on each track so long as I start from the beginning each time, the returned “tape” tracks would be offset from the daw recording ones all by the same amount and be in synch with each other.

Thoughts?

Seems like an awful lot of hoops to go through to add some tape hiss and head bump, and unless your deck is properly aligned, some high frequency roll off to your DAW tracks. Why not just just mix everything to final form, then run the stereo mix to your tape deck. You'll probably end up with a lot less hiss, and still get your analog "goodness".

 

[RFR]

Seems like an awful lot of hoops to go through to add some tape hiss and head bump, and unless your deck is properly aligned, some high frequency roll off to your DAW tracks. Why not just just mix everything to final form, then run the stereo mix to your tape deck. You'll probably end up with a lot less hiss, and still get your analog "goodness".

You could also run into the tape machine stereo sub mixes, say of the drums.

Bring that back into the daw, line it up with the daw drum tracks and you have all the original individual drum tracks as well as the ‘analog goodness’
Just using drums as an example but the sky’s the limit.

Me, I wouldn’t go through all the trouble of trying to sync a two track tape machine to my daw. I don’t even bother with my 16 track.

 

[TalismanRich]

If you do want to process the track through tape, you'll definitely want to read the playback head as you record. Trying to record it to tape and THEN dump to tape will result in serious timing issues.

This was from another forum, where the person did a 2 minute drum track on 2 digital recorders and a tape deck. After 2 minutes, the tape had drifted 0.15 seconds or 150ms after only 2 minutes. The digital tracks match up pretty darn well (there's a very slight difference). I cut all three tracks at the same point to "condense" the timeline, but all three track were treated the same. Initial wave peaks were aligned by zooming in.