Issue 1 - Channel 10 is EXTREMELY distorted. Unusable…The whole desk was super dirty when I got it, and took hours of dusting, iso, contact cleaner, blah blah, but channel 12 never came good.
Channel 10 or channel 12?
What troubleshooting have you done already?
What’s your experience level fixing electronics?
What tools do you have on-hand for troubleshooting/repairing electronics?
All that aside I’ll just throw some stuff at you that I’d do.
Is the signal path bad regardless of the input? Like, it doesn’t matter what input you select and use on the channel, it’s bad?
Is the signal bad at the DIRECT OUT jack?
Is the signal bad at the ACCESS SEND jack?
Is the signal bad when you monitor the signal via one of the AUX busses set in PRE fade mode?
Understand these three monitoring means tap the signal at three very different points in the signal path, and depending on the condition of the signal at these three points it greatly narrows down where we need to look for the fault.
Please answer all the questions.
Please answer in detail.
Issue 2 - PGM 6 Buss fader is basically a switch. Just a notch above 0 effectively turns the signal "on", and no more gain/volume is produced from the rest of the fader. No amount of cleaning has helped the poor fader. I use the PGM busses to feed the 8 channels of my tape machine directly, so when recording to channel 6 on tape I will swap the cables around for 6&4 as a workaround. Fairly annoying to do every session!
Sounds like a damaged wiper bridging the tracks on the element. Which type of faders do you have on your M-520? The low-profile yellow-zinc colored body faders with the horizontal element, or the tall chrome bodied faders with the vertical element? Post a pic if you don’t know. Ask questions if you don’t even know how to access the faders. This will help me know where you’re at with your abilities and guide you. The only way to really clean the faders is to remove them from the chassis and disassemble them. Have you done that? Or are you just jetting appropriate cleaner in there?
Last issue, and very likely my own signal flow is to blame, is the results once I've made it back to the DAW. I feel as though there must be a simple solution that I am missing. When REC I do everything OTB, console to tape. After recording, I'll do as much mixing as I can do OTB until I've reached a point I'm happy with. The idea next, is to send my 8 tracks of tape to my DAW for a final pinch of mixing, and then bounce back to a 2TRK in stereo for the finished mix.
However when I bring up my DAW, with all preamp levels on the MOTU set to 0, the levels are insanely hot, and they also seem to be compressed or limited in some sort of way. It forces me to essentially abandon the mix I was just happy with OTB, just to get some form of a clean signal into the DAW.. and by that point I don't like the mix anymore. Dynamically everything shifts - its a tough one to explain.
Details matter.
MOTU what?
What inputs are you using on the MOTU?
What outputs are you using on the M-520?
Have you considered just turning down the level of the input trims on the MOTU? That’s what they are there for…to match levels. But I’m still curious about all the above questions.
Is there a better way I could patch in my DAW to my system, effectively as a piece of hardware so I don't need to bounce all my tracks to the DAW? I tried running a compressor plugin thru the aux send and returns on the M520 to kind of trial that theory, but it seemed to introduce some phasing that I could only put down to latency.
Well, this is really a work-flow setup-specific kind of question, but I think, generally speaking, if you want to use the DAW as sort of a post-production tool, that’s how I would do it…basically transfer analog tracks to the DAW after I’ve done my pre A—>D analog processing…and transfer them all at once. Because if you do them only in part, you will grapple with latency issues, and if you have any mic bleed between any tracks, or any source-sharing, you’ll hear that phase distortion. Depending on your DAW hardware and software, including the computer itself, this latency could be very minimal, but it takes very little in these circumstances where there is any signal that remains analog that is shared with signal that takes the A/D/A trip. And you really would hear it if you used an AUX buss for an insert effect like a dynamics processor, and we’re mixing dry analog signal and wet A/D/A signal. So if it’s just a matter of figuring out your levels, if you want to use the DAW in this way, you’ll spare yourself headaches if all the analog tracks are transferred to the DAW simultaneously, even if not all tracks are experiencing shaping or processing in the DAW, and dumped back out for final mix after any DAW processing. That’s how I’d do it. I think there are plenty of folks here that have more experience with this than I do and hopefully they’ll chime in, but that’s my 2 pence.
I've got some patch-bays hanging around that I'm ready to rig up, but for the sake of keeping things simple to understand I've taken them out of the setup completely.
That’s wise.
Here's my signal flow:
PGM 1-8 --> TAPE IN 1-8
TAPE OUT 1-8 --> 11-18 TAPE IN M-520
11-18 DIRECT OUT --> 1-8 MOTU TRAVELLER MK3 (x4 RCA-XLR x4 RCA-TRS)
MOTU OUT 1-2 (monitoring DAW) ->> 6-7 LINE IN M-520
ST MSTR B --> 2TRK TAPE IN
2TRK TAPE OUT --> 2TRK B (19-20)
Okay here we go…I didn’t see the detail as to the gear and the connections until I got down this far.
So first of all, your level problem…the Traveler mk3 isn’t really setup very well for transferring 8 line level signals simultaneously. It can do it. But you have to have it set right.
Inputs 1~4 are either mic or hi-Z guitar depending on which of the combo connectors you use; mic on the XLR, hi-Z guitar on the TRS jack. Look in the MOTU manual…it warns you not to connect a +4dBu line level signal to the XLR. Now, you aren’t doing that…you are connecting a -10dBV nominal line level output to the mic input. But you have to pad the signal, and expect to not need much of any gain even with the pad inserted. You understand? You’re connecting a -10dBV nominal line level output to a mic input, which is expecting a much, much lower signal level. So push each of the four front-panel mic trim controls to engage the pad for each, and turn them down until have a good signal that’s not too hot.
The inputs 5~8 are line level, but they don’t have hardware trim controls. You probably know this already but you can adjust trim here in the DSP software via your computer. But it’s a limited range, arbitrarily from “0” to “+12”. So set your output level from the Tascam to get whatever you want there, and trim the inputs at the MOTU using the DSP software. That should help with your level matching issue.
