Are you referring to analog tape or DASH tape?
Or modular stuff like DA88 or ADAT?
:)

analog tape.

also scenaria, i was wondering if you could give me more info on your 8 track 1" machine.

This is why you clean everything in the tape path often. Analogue tape suffers from shedding oxide, much less from remagnetization. If all the guides and heads are clean, shedding is lessenned considerably.
PS: If you wish to reuse old analog tape, bulk erasing is preferable to just recording over old material.

Originally posted by blake eat world:
Is there a lot of loss in quality when recording to tape and someone keeps messing up so you have to record over and over? How much is too much, and the tape starts sounding bad?

That my firend is called 'beating the shit out of the tape'...it's one of the "advantages of digital", as you don't 'beat the shit out of the tape'.

Certain transports, like the transport on the ATR-124 or the Otari MTR-90 are 'capstanless', which reduces the 'beating the shit out of the tape factor' as the tape isn't pressed and pulled by a 'capstan', but works with a much 'floating transport' which is much gentler on the tape.

As Captain Analogue mentioned, you do want to keep the tape path clean, demag the machine every 100 or so hours of use, and also check that the heads aren't too flat, and that you havn't worn the 'guides' overly flat in the tape path area.

You can usually rotate the guides without too much of a struggle .

The remedy for this is when you're mixing...add a db of 10kHz when you do the mix alignment. There is an urban legend that had them adding 1/2 a db @ 10kHz per day when they got to mixing the Fleetwood Mac 'Tusk' album...I can't say if it's true or not...I wasn't there.

Best of luck.

Thanks for the help guys, I hate being an ignorant digital kid not knowing much about the analog world. That helped tremendously.

DASH on the other hand....well I need to only say one word :) safety safety safety oops....I guess that was three ;)

Ive never found dash tape even close to being as robust as analog.

Originally posted by Fletcher:
There is an urban legend that had them adding 1/2 a db @ 10kHz per day when they got to mixing the Fleetwood Mac 'Tusk' album...I can't say if it's true or not...I wasn't there.

You sure the 10k wasn't referring to the per diem they were adding to their noses? Listening to the album, I guess it's the same difference.

Don't know about Tusk but I know from a friend that the tapes were so beat up that they wound up mixing using the drum tracks from the safety masters on Rumors.

>>That my firend is called 'beating the shit out of the tape'...it's one of the "advantages of digital", as you don't 'beat the shit out of the tape'.<<

hehe ;)
I'm a shit beatin SOB ;)

William F. Turner
Songwriter
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