Mixdown deck for TASCAM 414 MK-II

[analogresistance]

Hello!

I bought a second hand TASCAM 414 MK-II 4-track tape recorder. I have been looking for information on equipment required to form an analog home studio, but I have doubts about the mixdown deck.

On the manual, it says I should plug a mixdown deck on the LINE OUT inputs of my TASCAM 414 MK-II to do the final mix before I can make copies of the tape to distribute. My questions are:

-Is a mixer the same as a mixdown deck? I asked a friend to recommend me a mixdown deck and he said the Behringer Xenyx 802 should work, but it doesn't look like what it showed on the manual...

-Can you recommend me a decent tape mixdown deck?

Thanks a lot and greetings from Spain,
D.

 

[bamonte]

Hey man,

Mixdown deck that you saw in the manual is a "Cassette Deck".

Which mean you mix your song on the 414 MKii first, after you are satisfied with the mix then you connect 414MKii to a cassette deck using "Line Out".

So you are basically recording what comes out from the 414MKii.

For mixdown, It does not have to be a cassette deck, I sometime mixdown to computer using Audacity. But that's just me.

Hope this will help.

edit : Mixdown deck or "cassette deck" I'm using is Yamaha Natural Sound, but any decent deck will do the job fine.

 

[SkywaveTDR]

If you want to go to a mix down deck I would suggest the Tascam 122 Mk II cassette or more correctly a Tascam 32, 42 ,52 or even a deck that has a good signal to noise ratio and usually they are 1/2 track decks. Otari made the MX5050 MKII and so on. You could use a computer too like the other guy says. It all depend on what you want to end up with.
When I did demo tapes for a number of people I used a 4 channel reel deck which then was mastered/mixed to the Tascam 52. I got real good results.