Tascam M3500, M2600, Mackie 8 buss "era" of consoles discussion

[BaronEstelle]

You've probably heard it before too....."Alanis Morisette's 'Jagged Little Pill' was done on a Mackie 3208 and 2 ADATs." If I've
seen that once I've see it a hundred times. Like some dreadful, alluring, conniving statement that lures you into thinking about
consoles, multritrack, et al. It started somewhere around there but I'll admit that statement was one of those "Hey...maybe I CAN
do this thing...."

I'm a classically trained pianist, from very early on, but I was never good enough to be a concert pianist though my 5-15 years included
no less than 3 yearly judged recitals per year in the piano school my family owned that I was of course expected to attend, and I did. That's
really a self-contained genesis story, not much else. One of those years was spent training on the Hammond B3 and of course a recital had to
be played on that and one song done in duet with the head teacher, and judged. I was the only male and the youngest student in the whole shebang for years and I hated it. I was all about football, bikes, guns, dirt, etc. But now it's one of the most valuable things I ever did. But it's still an isolated
segment. I didn't study music in college, it was graduate degrees in other subjects that led to a career in IT and in ministry. I'm a published author now with books on Amazon and whatnot and I'm an electronic composer of about 600 pieces of music with absolutely zero participation in, or patience for, the music industry per se, so there it is. A perfectly sterile history.

The period relevant to the title of this thread was right around the Alanis Morrisette when every man in American's collective manhood was in a little less stable and heavily questioned status with trollips like her encouraging women to go Bobbit if necessary. So here I am. I'd been moving up the ranks from humble beginnings on the DAL Card D+, the first truly professional audio recording card that really did, and still does, sound good.
I'd done about 20 albums of long-form synth material on that and a Mackie 1202, then a 1402 VLZ, those little mixers are fantastic and I still love them. I bit the bullet and got a Korg 1608 digital mixer and one ADAT, the 20 bit gold face, not the black face. It still overloaded so easy it was pathetic. I still hate those things. So after much ado and making more money that I regularly had the good sense to manage I bought a 3208 in Nashville and got that other ADAT 20 bit with the RCA things, what a pain.

Competitors around that time during the "8 Buss craze" were the M2600, really nice console, I wish I had gotten one of those instead. Even Soundtracs Topaz had an 8 buss with a permanently affixed bridge. Behringer had the Eurodesk or something, 8 buss again. Who else? I can't remember 8 buss was the word and ADAT was the target media. I shoulda got friggin clue right from the beginning when you first turn them on and hook them up and you think you've got a bad unit or messed something up when the stupid things take 4 hours to lock up. Sitting there with your sphincter tight enough to remove tire lugs thinking you've lost the track, eaten a tape, pissed off your talent, lost some of your own talent through sheer stress and sweated beads large enough to short one of them out.

So here we go with the Mackie, I had some rudimentary outboard gear; Alesis reverbs, mic pres, that sort've thing. I had to learn some quick lessons about channel bleed, and analog synth signals, and overload. Those ADAT's were just torture: you looked at them wrong and they'd overload. I hated those things. Run those meters way down below unity and keep everybody low and the mix sounds like after lunch food coma and Bible reading time at the local nursing home. I had a set of NS10's and I didn't really understand that they sounded THAT bad so I thought it was just me. Man....that was pretty sad. I then got Alesis Monitor Ones and things improved, but not really. They sounded better than the NS's but the mixes were still blowfish and rumbleheart. Flat, stinky, flatulent morasses of wannabee atmospherics just drubbing the middle of the meters begging for a sonic handout to finally reach to bucolic land of unity gain where the skies are blue and you hear Mozart every 30 minutes on loop.

I mastered out to a Tascam DA-30. I loved that thing. I would start shooting mixes out to that and just bump those faders up and run that out, now that was much more satisfying in the long run I do admit. I was only learning to mix, mix space, "outside the monitors", sweepable mids. Yeah, sweepable mids Mr. Mackie. After two years I was ready to sweep that mixer right out the back door and run over it a few times with my truck.

It was my own fault though. Those blasted mids. That was the one element of mixing on the Mackie that I just could not get. Maybe I don't have
the ears for it or the skill to translate what I hear or what I want into a mechanically realized result. I watched other guys with the sweepable mids
just turn the knob and "ah ha!" it hit the correct frequency point and that settled it. I was hardly ever able to do that. The sweepable mids have been an enigma to me ever since. I got two more 8 busses, and used them for recording. Moved up to a Mackie 24 track hard disk deal, it was better, got better results, got mixing down better, better outboard, more DAW more ITB, all the progression.

But I never, ever, mastered any of those 8 buss things, rarely even used them, probably didn't understand them. My issues with the Mackie were not because of the busses but because of me.

So now I'm here in my computer heavy ITB studio surrounding by 7 PC's of Win and Mac variety and an ethernet remote workstation in the garage for podcasting and recording. I got heavily into converters. Apogees rose to the top and I started using them with Reason on the Mac, some of the best mixes I've ever pulled off. Then I went for the holy grail with the Burl Mothership. Now this is really something incredible. I could drive a Mac truck through that line and that Burl would not overload for anything. NOW, I'm ready for a console and it's going to be an SSL. But in the meantime I'm looking at secondary consoles to either touch on a more vintage sound/vibe which brings me to M3500 land. The M-1B summing thing is great and has lots of headroom. I believe this is from the same era as the M3500 so I want more of that.

Did any of you folks get any of the Mackie, ADAT, etc. era gear, and what was your experience. Also, does anyone have any experience or
current ownership with the M3500? Pardon the novel but I want to give some context to where I be comin' from mayeen.

Thank you gentlemen. Have a great day while doing the Marginally Neato Domestic Brigade Boogie (MNDBB).

 

[sweetbeats]

M-1/M-1B are late 1970s early 1980s, the M-3000 series is latter 1980s. No relation between them.

All those consoles you mention are similar construction accept I’m not sure about the Behringer. But I’d have the least confidence in that just from experience. As far as the signal path goes the M-2600 series is the way standout of any of them. That’s the one I’d pick. A complete departure compared to everything else Teac/Tascam was doing in their more smaller 8-buss consoles…higher-class opamps, higher voltage audio power rails for more headroom, a completely unique (comparatively-speaking) mic amp with 6 transistors on the front end, and also a host of really cool monitor buss/split EQ features, semi-inline monitoring, etc. I’ve never used one but I expect would sound and perform better than the noted competition. It’s so odd that it was contemporaneous to the M-3000 series…would expect it to be similar electronically but it’s very different in a good way.

For mid-sweep EQ I’m not sure exactly what’s causing you trouble, but I’m often using mid-band EQ to subtract…let my ears tell me what’s a problem, boost the band and sweep-sweep-sweep to find where the setting makes the problem a BIG problem, and then cut. So I listen from the standpoint of what needs to go *away* to make the mix better, and you find what frequency that is by first boosting and then after you verify you cut. This practice doesn’t work well in a live FOH situation, obviously…in that case it’s nice to have a console that allows the operator to dump the EQ to the monitor path so you can audition changes and then pop them back into the sound reinforcement path, and in that case the boost-sweep-cut method can be used. The M-2600 series does this. In a recording/mixing setting it’s not problematic. With time and experience you start to not need to boost first all the time, you kind of learn and know what works for the different problems you hear. And obviously not every EQ is created equal. Good EQ works better/faster than not-so-good EQ; more accurate, less artifacts, just *works*.

 

[BaronEstelle]

I never realized that the M2600 was distinguished from it's contemporaries in that way. There was something else I wanted to tack on. The DM3200 and DM4800 consoles
are really dropping in price. Aside from the learning curve, how would those things work today for utility purposes in a studio in terms of sampling, keyboard submixes, things like
that. I really think the DM48000 is cool in that it can work as a control surface for Pro Tools, very successfully from what I've read.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

I have hundreds of hours on the M-2600. It's a pretty nice desk. One thing I found was that the mid filters were a bit narrower than I liked. They're okay for correcting some specific problems, but it was hard to do more general tone shaping.

 

[sweetbeats]

A filter for problems vs a filter for shaping. Interesting info…

To the OP regarding the question about the late gen Tascam DM consoles, they’ll sound different than the analog consoles, that doesn’t mean better or worse, that’s all up to the ear of the beholder. But it kind of depends on your workflow and what you want to experience: knob-per-function or not knob-per-function. I also think about more contemporary digital stuff and the problems they all run into: screen failures, fader failures, and eventually all this stuff that is primarily surface-mounted construction on the PCB assemblies, and chock full of SMT electrolytic caps that aren’t going to age as well as through-hole parts and tend to leak. The recap is going to be a bitch. The only digital console I have here is a Yamaha AW4416, a standalone DAW, and I already have a full set of new faders for it, spare LCD panels and a full set of replacement caps, all through-hole. It will be kind of a pain to adapt the through-hole parts to the surface-mount PCBs, but it’ll sound better and be good for some more decades. I really like the AW4416. Digital consoles do pack a ton of features into a smaller package so that’s a plus. So those are some things to think about. The learning curve too. But anything can be mastered with time and practice. I still prefer an analog console but it has to be good-sounding and quiet…and meet some minimum thresholds for me in terms of build-quality and the feature set. But if it checks those boxes I’d prefer interfacing with an analog console over a digital console for recording work. But I’m also not a young buck and spent a good part of my life in the pre-digital era. FOH I’m totally on the fence. The scene recall and features on most professional digital consoles make it hard to argue for an analog console in that setting.