Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Get that song on tape! Errr... disk?
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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by tdbajus » Mon Oct 22, 2018 12:53 pm

Larry Mal wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 12:41 pm
I never see any need to get a fucking Portastudio so I can make bad and noisy recordings no one will ever want to hear.

I make beautiful and clean recordings that no one wants to hear!
You are magnificent, Larry.

I would prevail upon the OP to go to Guitar Center and get whatever UAD Apollo you think you can afford, take it home for a weekend, and try it out.
If you have the opportunity to borrow a 4 track, record onto both units.

I doubt you will be returning the UAD interface. I have an Apollo8, and it's made recording incredibly easy- everything sounds fantastic.

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by Larry Mal » Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:11 pm

I need a new interface.
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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by Fuzzbuzz » Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:16 pm

I don't disagree, Larry. To the OP, try to find an AFFORDABLE Reel to Reel that's in GREAT working order. You will need the mixer to go with that. Don't forget all the cables. Oh yeah, you will need some mic preamps too. I'd imagine about $2000 should get you going. And dude.... fucking sonically tho.... you are going to sound amazing!

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by Larry Mal » Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:33 pm

Fuzzbuzz wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:16 pm
I don't disagree, Larry. To the OP, try to find an AFFORDABLE Reel to Reel that's in GREAT working order. You will need the mixer to go with that. Don't forget all the cables. Oh yeah, you will need some mic preamps too. I'd imagine about $2000 should get you going. And dude.... fucking sonically tho.... you are going to sound amazing!
Sigh.

Well, I've owned three reel to reel machines, haven't spent any "reel" money on them (see what I did there!).

They made portable ones, that would record to the 1/4" format (7.5 or 15 ips). It would be much better than cassette, specs-wise, anyway- I can't vouch for any particular machines.

Go to eBay and search for "portable reel to reel".

Since you can record to them, they'll have a pre-amp in them, so you won't need a mixer. I really don't know where you are getting this stuff from. You'll need a cable, that's for sure.

So, sure, a professional 8 track 2" machine would cost a lot of money. But the 1/4" machines don't. There's plenty of fun reel to reels out there to learn analog recording on. Like I say, you can do a digital mix, then send that out to tape, then bring it back in to digital, and bam, you've got the analog sound. And much better than any fucking cassette, because cassettes suck.

Please don't make absurd situations out of what I've said. I have a good amount of experience here, I know cassettes well, I owned two Portastudios and so I know they suck. Cassettes weren't a novelty to me growing up, it was the standard. I have worked with reel to reel to some degree- have you? I know digital recording very well.

A Portastudio might be useful as a live rig, the digital ones, anyway. But there is no point to a cassette. None. Nothing. You're dreaming.
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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by Fuzzbuzz » Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:39 pm

Larry Mal wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:33 pm
Fuzzbuzz wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:16 pm
I don't disagree, Larry. To the OP, try to find an AFFORDABLE Reel to Reel that's in GREAT working order. You will need the mixer to go with that. Don't forget all the cables. Oh yeah, you will need some mic preamps too. I'd imagine about $2000 should get you going. And dude.... fucking sonically tho.... you are going to sound amazing!
Sigh.

Well, I've owned three reel to reel machines, haven't spent any "reel" money on them (see what I did there!).

They made portable ones, that would record to the 1/4" format (7.5 or 15 ips). It would be much better than cassette, specs-wise, anyway- I can't vouch for any particular machines.

Go to eBay and search for "portable reel to reel".

Since you can record to them, they'll have a pre-amp in them, so you won't need a mixer. I really don't know where you are getting this stuff from. You'll need a cable, that's for sure.

So, sure, a professional 8 track 2" machine would cost a lot of money. But the 1/4" machines don't. There's plenty of fun reel to reels out there to learn analog recording on. Like I say, you can do a digital mix, then send that out to tape, then bring it back in to digital, and bam, you've got the analog sound. And much better than any fucking cassette, because cassettes suck.

Please don't make absurd situations out of what I've said. I have a good amount of experience here, I know cassettes well, I owned two Portastudios and so I know they suck. Cassettes weren't a novelty to me growing up, it was the standard. I have worked with reel to reel to some degree- have you? I know digital recording very well.

A Portastudio might be useful as a live rig, the digital ones, anyway. But there is no point to a cassette. None. Nothing. You're dreaming.
EBAY! HAHAHA.. 1/4"! HAHAHAHA Larry you're a funny dude! I’m just messing with you man. Clearly you have an opinion about cassette.

I’ve had a little reel to reel experience. In addition to owning two machines for the last 20 years, That’s all I recorded on u til about 2001 when Stepped into a friends fully digital studio for the first time.

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by julius2790 » Mon Oct 22, 2018 7:49 pm

I have a Tascam 414 and a 488 (8-track version). IMHO there is a useful aesthetic to the cassette that is difficult to get from the DAW though I like to use both. What I like to do is cut to tape and then bounce to the DAW for mixing and whatnot.

I feel that the preamps on something like a 424 or even a 414 are special and can be used without cutting to tape though the tape still seems to add vibe on vocals, acoustic guitar, and drums especially.

A couple of my friends made a run of pedals that are based off a 424 Tascam preamp and if anyone is interested please check out http://www.424recording.com.

Jay (The Wizard) on the board came up with a schematic for a pedal that allows for the 4-track sound and can be used with a DAW or digital interface. You can use his pedal with a mic or any guitar/bass/synth and here are some vid samples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OsKC8MBvaw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijbc4aRnyok

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkouGHGcArY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTftSNCvF48

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoVgkA0cXjs

I wish I had access to a real tape setup but the 4-track vibe is super cool for the kind of music I like to try and create. Here's an example of the kind of stuff I've been doing with the 4-track to DAW setup:

https://soundcloud.com/julius2790/downt ... sting-time

https://soundcloud.com/julius2790/lover ... s-braggers

https://soundcloud.com/julius2790/one-spot

https://soundcloud.com/julius2790/i-call-her-moonbeam

https://soundcloud.com/julius2790/pull- ... from-a-jar

I really feel like if you are into 60's kind of sounds that using the 4-track or something that approximates the preamp can be worth exploring. You have issues with tape drag when bouncing to a DAW from cassette but you can time correct things without too much difficulty and I feel that the vibe from the tape is well worth the effort at times.

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by tdbajus » Tue Oct 23, 2018 7:59 am

Larry Mal wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:11 pm
I need a new interface.
I just bought the Apollo8, and I would keep it over the set of manley, langevin, chameleon labs neve clones, and Metric Halo 2882 I used to have. Rock solid, converters are amazing, and the plug-ins unparalleled.

The major downside is that UAD really gouges you on the plugs, but they will be the first ones you go for, every time.

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by Larry Mal » Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:19 am

Ah, right. I forgot, I kind of "broke up" with UAD since I had a couple of UAD-1 cards that was made obsolete by that company. I forget the details but I do remember vowing not to do business with them in the future even though I loved those plug ins, especially their plate reverb one.
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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by BearBoy » Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:32 am

I did :) . Thanks for posting.

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by tdbajus » Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:53 am

Larry Mal wrote:
Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:19 am
Ah, right. I forgot, I kind of "broke up" with UAD since I had a couple of UAD-1 cards that was made obsolete by that company. I forget the details but I do remember vowing not to do business with them in the future even though I loved those plug ins, especially their plate reverb one.
The EMT plates are amazing.

I also got screwed, because I originally bought the UAD1 with the deluxe package. The plugs transferred, but I had recycled the computer and the UAD card, so when they allowed you to turn in the UAD1 for credit on the new stuff, they wouldn't give me the benefit of the doubt.

Furthermore, all of the subsequent bundles they offered at the time included plugs that were part of the original deluxe package- meaning that because I had made a big investment when the really needed it, I would have to pay full price for the ones I didn't have. When I asked if I could substitute plugins of equal value, the customer service guy was a complete asshole.

You may have noticed that now they offer generic "buy any three plugs for $X" now. Their customer service has changed- the last dealing I had with them the guy bent over backwards to help me out.

Still, since it has so many outputs, I just wired up two that are devoted solely to reamping stuff, and while their space echo emulation is cool, I can run out to various pedals for even more fun.

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by tdbajus » Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:53 am

Yeah, your post ruled, and was greatly appreciated by at least two people.

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by øøøøøøø » Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:42 am

Something interesting to piggyback on a point about bit depth from the post above--

To prove that noise floor is the only difference between bit depths, have a go at this blind test. It's Neil Young's "Rockin' In The Free World" at both 16 bit and 8 bit.

https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_1 ... lYoung.php

Take the test and see if you can guess whether the file is 8 bit or 16 bit 19 out of 20 times. That's a 95% confidence interval, at which point you can be fairly certain that you're not just getting lucky.

I was able to choose correctly five times in a row just now... but ONLY in headphones, by paying VERY careful attention to the noise floor. The 8 bit example, if you listen closely, has a layer of white noise that's mostly masked by the open hi hat, but if you're really careful, you can distinguish it.

In terms of "resolution" (whatever that means) and frequency response, the signal that's present is the same in both... the noise floor is just higher. If we were able to hear a silence on the recording (with a note decaying into it), however, the difference would be more obvious.

Compact cassettes have about 50dB of dynamic range (sometimes stretching to 60). This isn't too much better than 8 bit noise performance. That's already "not great." But if you combine multiple tracks, you're increasing the hiss by 3dB each time. Then if you do bounces or go down generations, you're getting 3dB noisier each time as well. If you're printing at a low level and not taking advantage of the full dynamic range, you're then getting noisier by that amount of 'untapped potential.' So you can quickly see how cassette four tracks get very noisy very quickly.

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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by Larry Mal » Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:02 am

Well, I was going to skip the rest of this thread for the most part, but I do have some quibbles with what you wrote and some of your paraphrasing simply misquoted me entirely. I know that was your point, but Brad, while you are free to disagree with me on anything and I love the conversation, and it's of course always possible that I could be more clear or even outright wrong, it is a little lame of you to twist my words around to something that I never said in order to make a point. Who does that?

For instance, I wrote:

"Basically, tape is an analog, so it literally writes an analog waveform of what it records (vinyl does that also in the grooves). The more "real estate" you give that analog to write to, the better sounding it is (there are exceptions)."

I did not write:

"The more size you have for an analog medium-- the wider the tape tracks or the wider the spacing of the grooves on an analog disc-- the better the sound"

I would not have been able to write anything about the wider the spacing of the grooves on an analog disc because I don't even know if that's true sitting here right now. You later say that, "A wider tape track allows better performance chiefly in one area, and that's signal-to-noise ratio."

When is "better signal to noise ratio" not considered better sound? You are really quibbling with me over that? I mean, I guess I could have been more technically accurate, but still... I'll say that "better signal to noise ratio" does in fact equal "better sound" anytime. Also, bear in mind that I said "there are exceptions", namely, a lot of people feel that you can get tighter bass sounds at 15ips rather than 30.

I also did not write this:

"Cassettes reproduce up to 15kHz, and that's terribly inadequate"

I wrote:

"I'm finding it a little hard to get accurate figures for the frequency range of cassettes, like I say. The figure of 15k seems to be accepted:

Compact cassettes may have a response extending up to 15 kHz at full (0 dB) recording level.

I seem to be reading that cassettes also only start hearing bass frequencies around 50k."

I wasn't talking about what a cassette reproduces ("plays back") but rather the frequency response that a cassette can capture ("write to"). I view a recording medium that cannot capture the "full range" of sounds that an instrument to be able to play or microphones to be able to record to be inadequate, especially in the face of digital competition that can capture the full range, and is cheaper, and provides better editing and everything else on top of it.

And for the record, I am still not 100% on the recordable frequency ranges that cassettes can capture, which is why I said so.

Regardless I am confident that cassette tape cannot capture the full range of sound that digital audio can capture. You and others might disagree with me on the importance of sound above 15k, and that's fine. I happen to think it's important to capture that, I think there is useable sound there (more than "air"), you might disagree, like I say.

Still I see no reason to accept a medium that allows for anything other than recording the full 20-20k. There are microphones that shunt off immediately at 15k, to be sure. But there are plenty that go all the way up to 20k and I want the medium I record to to be able to put down everything that any microphone I put in front of a sound source can capture. Why would I not?

You also quote me as saying that CD quality was never good, which I'll hold to. We can disagree with whether or not it was ever very good, you might think so. But regarding it as being obsolete, well, the 16 bit nature of "CD quality" has long been surpassed by 24 bit, which is better in every way I can think of. I probably also don't need to remind you that the CD as a format has been seeing plunging sales for quite some time now, I haven't double checked these figures but assuming they are correct, CD sales went from 943 million at the peak in 2000 or so, to less than 99 million less than a decade later. That's a tenth... that's a huge drop.

I don't have figures to tell me what CD player sales are, I'll imagine they have also fallen. There is no Apple computer currently made that has a CD or DVD player built into it, Dell is following suit, and I'll suggest that in five more years pretty much almost all computers one can buy will not have a CD/DVD drive built into them.

So yes, the CD is obsolete. It has been long surpassed in performance and is a fading medium that will not be well known in twenty years.

You go on to disagree with an admittedly simple graphic I put up:

"This isn't how digital audio works. It's a misleading graphic, and has led to untold levels of misunderstanding. It's not anyone's fault... it's just a bad 'internet narrative' that's facile and oversimplified. The Nyquist filter I was discussing above makes the stair-steps go away.

It seems counterintuitive, but it's true-- there are no "stair-steps" or "slices of time" in the output of a digital audio device. The complete, analog waveform is reconstructed from the sampling data, in all of its perfectly-smooth, continuous, analog glory. The samples are not the signal. The samples are data points that allow the complete analog waveform to be "drawn" in a fashion that's at least theoretically-identical to what it was on input. "


Brad, I wasn't talking about output. My words, right before I put that image up, were, "I see no reason not to capture everything that the instrument creates. Why not? Disk space doesn't cost much these days." Right? I'm talking about recording here.

That article wasn't talking about output, it was talking about how sampling works for recording, right?

Did you read the article, it was linked there? Or did you just look at the graphic?

Because the article says, "Multi track recorders vary between 16/44.1 and 24/96. When you buy one you have to decide which way to go and get it right the first time."

So yeah, that graphic shows a very simple picture of a sine wave being sampled. That's not inaccurate, is it? Digital might output an analog (or at least something our ears will accept as an analog), but it does not record ("sample") an analog. Two different concepts.

What is in between two samples of audio at 44.1k? Nothing. It wasn't recorded. All your computer knows is what the two samples themselves were. And that's inherently not an analog, and that's what the graphic was showing.

It wasn't saying anything about digital output.
Last edited by Larry Mal on Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by Larry Mal » Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:27 am

Also, Brad, you have "me" quoted as saying that "recording to tape always causes compression", but again, that's not what I wrote.

What I wrote was:

If you really want a tape "sound", some people record their whole album directly to tape these days. While that's great, you could instead just do your whole song down, get the mix in place, and then record that mix out to reel to reel.

Basically, all tape has a built in compression to it, and a "warmth" that comes from a few factors. But anyway, once you output your stereo mix to the reel to reel, then you can bounce your reel to reel back to digital, and there you have it- you now have the tape sound on your whole song.


And I will agree that should have been worded more clearly. In the context of what I was saying, which was ultimately uninteresting to you as you made your own point based on words I didn't say, I was talking about outputting a 24 bit recording to tape. That's a concept you have scorn for, and I don't recall saying that it was wonderful or anything only that you could do it and get some tape flavor.

But my point was regarding outputting a 24 bit recording to audio tape, which would in fact lead to compression of the material, but I should have said that more clearly, like along the lines of, "Basically, all tape has a built in compression compared to digital audio, less dynamic range..." and so on with my original point about bouncing digital mixes to tape. So thanks for letting me know my words were unclear.

Although I could still take a stand as saying that since cassette tapes have a dynamic range of 60 to 70 dB, and 24 bit audio has a theoretical dynamic range of 144 dB, that would in fact qualify as "compression". It's a more "compressed" medium inherently and so anything you record to cassette that had a greater dynamic range than 60 to 70 dB, would be "compressed". But that would really be me employing some legalese, the fact is, I did speak unclearly in my original wording.

And now I genuinely am done with this thread for the most part, and probably anything else like this for a while here. While I certainly have to accept responsibility for the way these things go around here, I will have to say that I am pretty stunned to see what I wrote being crudely parodied in order to make points based on things that I never said.

I always give people the courtesy on here of quoting their exact words when I disagree with them. I'm a little irritated, frankly, not to have been given that kind of respect.

Not a big deal or anything. This is yet another thread I never should have gotten involved in, a recurring theme on this site lately. Best of luck, all.
Last edited by Larry Mal on Tue Oct 23, 2018 11:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Anyone have recs on a cassette 4 track?

Post by UlricvonCatalyst » Tue Oct 23, 2018 11:13 am

In the interest of diverting attention from those who would turn this thread into a discussion that might be more at home on the 'What Hi-fi?' forum (if such a thing exists), a German "indie-pop" enthusiast, who was instrumental in getting a posthumous vinyl release for some old Tascam 4-track demos I recorded a million years ago, told me that my newer - i.e. digital - recordings were "too slick-sounding".

Different strokes for different folks. Just sayin'....

I stand by my surmise that the OP's enquiry is all about the lo-fi, until I hear otherwise.

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