 Board Message |
I can do a little comparison for you... |
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Board Message |
I can do a little comparison for you... |
[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Active Message Board ] [ Archive Home Page ] Posted by JC on April 13, 2000 at 08:22:29:
In Reply to: Re: 8-track cassette posted by Brad on April 12, 2000 at 23:41:31:
We recorded our last CD twice- once on 8-track cassette, once on an ADAT. The differences are suprisingly subtle- don't get me wrong, the ADAT sounds LOADS better on individual tracks, but in a mix, the cassette machine doesn't sound a lot worse, if you're VERY careful. I was always very careful to avoid bouncing and took into account the effect of tape saturation when recording. Saturday the singer is bringing back our masters, so I can post cassette vs. ADAT versions somewhere if you'd like.
I don't know about Mini Disc but what kept me away from them was media availability. I can get tapes for my Yamaha MT8 at Target (Maxell XLII60's). Incidentally, my machine only allows for about 16 minutes of recording time due to it's high tape speed. It's not a great idea to get longer than 60 min tapes because of tape stretch... you'll find it's trickier to keep things in pitch, or at least I did.
The unit has DBX NR which I always used.
The biggest disadvantage to cassette units is that most of them (my MT8 included) only do four simultaneous tracks. This means you're a little limited as to what you can record simultaneously. I recorded three tracks of drums (kick, snare, overhead) and one track of scratch vocals, guitars, bass, etc. Then we would overdub the other four tracks- bass, guitar, guitar, guitar solo, then the singe would record over the original scratch track with a track of vocals. Since all the tracks are first generation, they still retain a lot of their sweetness and noise is held to a minimum. And you don't have to make too many decisions when tracking.
The other disadvantage is that no matter how precisely built the transport is, you'll still have some slight variations between "real" time and "tape" time. This is only a problem if you're trying to sync to a computer or another machine for extra tracks. If you do try sync, the only bulletproof way is to waste a track on the cassette machine for FSK or SMPTE timecode. Otherwise, you'll just dump all 8 tracks into the DAW simultaneously and record backing tracks to these tracks on the DAW, and forget about the cassette. With digital recording, you can be sure that one minute into the song equals one minute into the song, no matter what. Even those that sync 2" tape to computers have this problem- the pro's usually either sacrifice a track to SMPTE or simply dump all the tracks from the analog machine simultaneously into a DAW.
Ultimately you'll ditch whatever you buy for a computer-based system, I suspect. The cassette multitracker is a great learning tool, though, and mine now lives at various other bandmembers houses and is used as a scratchpad- they record their ideas, bring them to the studio, and we dump them into the DAW, then track demos based on the casette ideas. It's a real easy way to work.
good luck!
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