The Sound of Ancient TASCAM Technology

Mark Richards

Soundaholic
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Dec 31, 2017
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From
Somewhere Near Nashville
Gear owned
DP-24/40-4MTR/M30
While rummaging through my storage facility, I came across a 15 IPS 2-Track master tape I engineered and mastered back in the day at my commercial studio.

The tape box indicates this tape was part of a session for a cover band called Upton Xpress.

The multi-tracking was done in our demo room, which had a 15 IPS Tascam 80-8 MTR with Type 1 DBX and biased for Ampex 456 tape; and two Tascam M-3 consoles daisy chained for 16x8 operation.

The master was made on a Tascam 3300-2T half track deck, no noise reduction, biased for Ampex 456 tape. (I had to bake the 456 tape before I could dub it over to digital.)

On my playback deck's VU meters, the 2-Track master swings through about -2 VU with peaking to +3 VU.

I dubbed at unity gain onto my DP-24 with no added compression, eq, or fx. So by digital standards, this song is pretty hot, but my ears couldn't hear any distortion in the dub.

I thought you folks might get a kick hearing what "ancient" TASCAM technology sounded like. I recommend downloading. Playing it online in Dropbox doesn't do it justice. ;)

Reference headphones like the Sennheiser HD 600, AKG K701, Beyerdynamics DT-880, etc. will give you a realistic representation of how this track sounds over my reference system.
 
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Love that vintage sound, Mark! Good dub over to digital.
 
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Nice! definitely has the tape “glue” to the mix. And those 80’s drum sounds, right? Nice ‘verb.
 
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