Tascam 1800 gain control

G

gumbostu

New member
Hi everybody and thanks for all your help while i was a guest!

My 1800 arrived yesterday and i have a couple of questions. The first is about the gain control knobs. They seem to have a sweet spot and there is very little leeway around what constitutes a good input level. micing a vocal, say, the spot is at around 80% where 75% is too quiet and 85% is peaking. A friend came around and adjusted the gain control and stepped back and went "hmm".

Although the primary purpose for the 1800 is recording, we'd been hoping to be able to use this for extra inputs into the PA live if needed, but the gain sensitivity would make that awkward.

So my question is .. does this sound normal to those of you with the same model? or is mine weird?

And my other question is how would i go about getting input from a Yeti USB mic headphone out into the tascam? We've been doing demo recordings with the Yeti in our practice room and i'd like to be able to record the room with that mic while we record the band through the tascam. So i can have a comparison (and maybe some ambience, though i doubt the quality would be adequate.)

Any other ideas for getting a simultaneous recording from the Yeti would be cool, short of setting up another computer! Life would have been so great if the Tascam had aggregated!

Thanks
 
Hi gumbostu,

I too recently purchased a US-1800, and I also noticed what you said about the gain. It seems to be responsive enough from a recording standpoint--my DAW picked it up just fine. However, when using headphones or monitors, there's definitely a sweet spot as you put it. But I've barely scratched the surface on this model as of yet. I'll let you know if I discover more...

As for using the Yeti to record a room along side the Tascam: I don't know why you couldn't just run them both into your computer? You wouldn't need two computers, but two DAWs would suffice. For example, run the Tascam as the input device in Ableton Live, and then just have the Yeti running into Audacity. They wouldn't even need to use the same drivers, so you shouldn't have a problem there. I'm assuming you're running an ASIO driver for the Tascam (I'm not sure if it would run full duplex without ASIO?) Anyway, you should be able to import that recording from Audacity (for example) and use it in your DAW.

Hope that helps, as my experience is limited. But I can concur with you about the gain knobs, at least ;-)
 
I noticed the same thing. I've had the unit for a little over a month and I'm still figuring out that sweet spot. I'm thinking about relying on an external pre-amp, but at the same time I am sort of stubborn and want to work with what I've got.
Just out of curiousity, are either/both of you working with the included DAW or something else?

-nic
 
Hello fellow Tascam doods. What level are you all trying to achieve in your DAW? There is no reason to find a 'sweet spot' on a clean preamp such as those that come with the 1800. The idea is not to get as loud as possible without clipping. In fact, quite the contrary. You are looking for an input level within your DAW of around -18dbfs. This is the digital equivalent of 0db in the analog world. The LED lights on the 1800 are just to warn of being near overload of the preamp, not to suggest a good recording level.

It is rare for me to even turn up the gain at all on 1-8 when recording drums. Noise floor is of much less issue when recording digitally. Use your DAW/monitors for volume.

Jimmy
 
Oh, and that is the limitation of a USB mic. It is not usable with an interface. At least not the Tascam when used as your sound card. :(
 
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