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4-Track Cassette Transfer - A Diary [**Paused**]


Nail Soup
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Apologies for the blank post above. I was going to write something yesterday, but my reply was getting too complex for me to type on my phone and after deleting what little I had written I then hit "reply" instead of cancel.

Anyway...

I would have thought you would have used noise reduction. IME all cassette recorders generated far too much tape hiss especially when bouncing tracks for NR not to be an essential option. Dolby B was fairly useless, but Dolby C was pretty good. On the 4-track cassette player I had, using Dolby C, we could go two bounces and still have a stereo master that we could make copies from without the results being too terrible.

Also, unlike DBX, Dolby C didn't mess up the sync track, if you were using one.

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11 minutes ago, SpondonBassed said:

I seem to recall that noise reduction was frowned upon in some circles.  Tape noise was reckoned to be less of a handicap to the music than the head-under-a-blanket sound of NR.

If Dolby B was your only option, and you were making a single generation copy on a decent "HiFi" cassette machine from a good quality source then you were probably better off with using noise reduction.

However all but the very cheapest 4-track machines had either DBX or Dolby C NR which were both vastly superior. For 4-track recording where you would almost certainly be doing at least one bounce plus a stereo master mix which would then be used to run off your demo cassette copies, you really needed to make use of the NR otherwise the tape hiss would start to over-power some parts of the recording.

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22 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

If Dolby B was your only option, and you were making a single generation copy on a decent "HiFi" cassette machine from a good quality source then you were probably better off with using noise reduction.

However all but the very cheapest 4-track machines had either DBX or Dolby C NR which were both vastly superior. For 4-track recording where you would almost certainly be doing at least one bounce plus a stereo master mix which would then be used to run off your demo cassette copies, you really needed to make use of the NR otherwise the tape hiss would start to over-power some parts of the recording.

I was a bit niaive  back then, didn't know much about noise reduction..... probably associated Dolby with Audiophiles etc to be honest. I was always working alone really...... 4-track was a solo activity, never collaborated so even less chance to exchange ideas about NR and so on.  And no internet or Basschat either!

In practice I only ever did one bounce per song, and tape noise was not the limiting factor in my recordings anyway! Some of the recordings ending up sounding good in a noisy lo-fi way. Others sounded the bad kind of lo-fi!

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Regarding a four channel audio interface, I found this one from Behringer. Sells cheap, like a lot of Beheringer stuff - e.g £68 plus postage.

Look like it would meet my needs for the cassettes, and could double as a little mixer to feed into e.g powered PA speaker etc. If I'm reading the spec correctly. Or I could sell it afterwards.

https://www.behringer.com/behringer/product?modelCode=P0ALM

Advice/opinions welcome.

usb mixer.PNG

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11 minutes ago, Nail Soup said:

Regarding a four channel audio interface, I found this one from Behringer. Sells cheap, like a lot of Beheringer stuff - e.g £68 plus postage.

Look like it would meet my needs for the cassettes, and could double as a little mixer to feed into e.g powered PA speaker etc. If I'm reading the spec correctly. Or I could sell it afterwards.

https://www.behringer.com/behringer/product?modelCode=P0ALM

Advice/opinions welcome.

 

I think that can only send the stereo mix to your PC, not four isolated tracks at the same time.

 

 

Edited by ahpook
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