While some multitrack cassette recorders were well-engineered, they were all made for the home and project studio market so can be difficult to repair, with some of their original parts having been cheap and/or unreliable.Low speed (standard cassette speed) and Hi speed (double standard cassette speed) were both options but not always available on all machines so to offer a complete service a wide range of replay machines is needed.Dolby S cards in Tascam 238 machines can also be problematic and require time consuming component replacement. Dolby B, C, S and dbx noise reduction were all options with these formats and ascertaining which was used, if not originally documented, can be tricky.Multitrack audio cassettes can also have other specific problems not seen with standard stereo audio cassettes: The machines we use all have easily-adjusted playhead azimuth to get the best from your tapes. On many cheaper tape players this is difficult, not very accurate and is often not done, so tape transfers can suffer. Unless you are playing back a tape recorded from a known, properly-calibrated tape machine, it is often necessary to adjust the playhead azimuth to get the best high frequency response when digitising audio cassettes. It’s quite common for the Azimuth in cassette recordings to vary between tapes and recording machines. This is often the case - but with the right tools well-recorded cassettes can sound very good and the best can be got from other recordings. ![]() While these can sometimes be repaired by replacing the capacitors, it can be neccessary to replace the whole board and motor, which we have recently done - getting hold of (apparently) the very last one available from Teac UK!ĭue to the small tape width and slow speed that normal speed cassettes run at, they usually have a reputation for poor sound quality and reduced frequency response. In addition to the mechanical problems of wear that affect the tape transport, the direct drive capstan motor circuit board can start to fail, causing the tape speed to increase wildly. We have both machines at the Greatbear studio. The 238 had dbx and the 238S had Dolby S noise reduction that helped to improve the signal to noise ratio. Quality was pretty good due to the fast recording speed of 3.75 inches per second (ips) or 9.5 cm/s which is twice the normal cassette deck speed. The Tascam 238 was a multitrack machine that managed to squeeze 8 tracks from the 3.81mm (0.15 inch) compact cassette tape width. This is a robust machine, built for studio use and therefore easier to maintain than the smaller multitrack cassette machines with their built-in mixers. We use the Tascam 234 rack version of their multitrack for transfers with dbx noise reduction if necessary. Cassette tape can still sound good after a long time if stored correctly and transferred with serviced and calibrated tape machines. These machines were robust but are now close to 40 years old. Many happy hours have been spent using 4-track cassette machines such as the Tascam 244 Portastudio to record music over the years. We offer free assessments - please contact us to discuss your project.įor an introduction to our assessment and treatment processes, please see our guide to "what happens to your audio tape". Multitrack compact cassette tapes vary widely in duration and in the extent of physical tape degradation, so we always assess tapes before confirming the price of a transfer. ![]() ![]() Files delivered on hard drive can be for any operating system - MacOS, Windows or GNU/Linux and filesystems (HFS+, NTFS or EXT3). We can provide the appropriately - sized USB delivery media for your files, or use media supplied by you, or deliver your files online. We can also digitise to 24-bit / 192 kHz, if required. ![]() We're happy to create any other digital audio files, according to your needs. Following International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives TC-04 guidelines, we deliver 24-bit / 96 kHz high resolution Broadcast WAV files, together with MP3 audio file or audio CD listening versions. We offer a range of delivery formats for our audio transfers. 8-track doubled that capacity.Īt Greatbear, we carefully restore and digitise all variations of 4-track and 8-track compact cassette tape. Whereas stereo compact cassette recording uses 2 tracks (left and right) for side A of a tape, and 2 tracks (left and right), in the other direction for side B, a 4-track head assembly allowed musicians to record separately to all four tracks in the same direction, with the added possibilities of over-dubbing. Multitrack compact cassette machines became hugely popular in home studios during the 1980s and ‘90s.
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