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Curry Pervert wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 3:20 pm You can still find bargains in the 4-track dept. if you keep looking. However, it's not just the cost of the machine you need to worry about, even used cassettes are selling for £5+.

Seattle Deliver Company has 5 packs for $15, which seems like the price they have always been.

https://www.amazon.com/Maxell-108562-Pa ... 270&sr=8-1

penningtron wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 1:59 pm I had 2 Porta 02s, and they both sounded really distorted in recording/playback mode. You basically had to trust that the part you were overdubbing was correct, because the reference sound was almost useless.

I will never record with one again, but yeah as a noise or filter-y thing (and yes, as a distortion pedal a la Medicine) they might still be fun to work with.

That had to be a Porta02 thing, because monitoring while recording on a 424 sounded fine. We broke out one of my old 424s for the Nirvana PRF Month a couple years back and recorded drums and bass with it (and I think the left guitar track too because you can hear me manually switch it in). It even recorded a little cleaner than I remembered!

https://prfmonthlytributeseries.bandcam ... -party-mix

It's the high bias/XLII tapes that are fetching high prices, not so much the consumer grade stuff. I've been making albums on 488 and 488 MKII machines for a long time. All of my band's records were made on 4 and 8 track cassette recorders. My recent solo album was too, and it's got a bit more going on in terms of utilizing the 8 track to it's fullest. There's a link to it in my signature if you wanna check it out. I love the Tascam stuff and I've become pretty competent at troubleshooting and repairing them myself. I don't mind a bit of tape noise at all, but the DBX on the 488 MKII is amazing. The end result can sound pretty pro.

Multi track cassette tape machines are a fucking blast. Have fun!

Kniferide wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 4:21 pm

Curry Pervert wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 3:20 pm You can still find bargains in the 4-track dept. if you keep looking. However, it's not just the cost of the machine you need to worry about, even used cassettes are selling for £5+.

Seattle Deliver Company has 5 packs for $15, which seems like the price they have always been.

https://www.amazon.com/Maxell-108562-Pa ... 270&sr=8-1

That's not a bad price but they're normal bias.

jason from volo wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 8:16 pm

Curry Pervert wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 3:20 pm You can still find bargains in the 4-track dept. if you keep looking. However, it's not just the cost of the machine you need to worry about, even used cassettes are selling for £5+.

Are you shitting me?! My Dad had a cache of unopened / unused cassettes.

I had no idea that this stuff would actually (potentially) be worth something.

Have a look on ebay and you can see what they're going for.

Curry Pervert wrote: Wed Jul 14, 2021 2:47 pm That's not a bad price but they're normal bias.

Dude, it's for a 20+ year old tape consumer taper recorder, regular bias is fine. I'm sure the lofi police are aren't going to pull out a gun.

I felt like tape length was a more significant quality factor than high vs. normal bias, due to the thinner tape required for longer spools. C-60 or less (if that even exists still) is ideal.

I often used to record a junker take before a good take, to get all the goofs out over the junk section and not have too many passes over the keeper one.

penningtron wrote: Wed Jul 14, 2021 3:28 pm I felt like tape length was a more significant quality factor than high vs. normal bias,

Definitely. 120 min cassettes sounded like total shit no matter what bias they were. I also used to record everything on high speed with my pitch wheel cranked. As fast as I could get it moving. I've noticed speed differences plying back tapes from different machines, but who gives a floof? It's a 4 track recorder. I'm most likely going to flip the tape and listen to it all backwards anyway. If you really want better fidelity form a Tascam machine, just use a real preamp. I used my Sytek with mine once just to play around ant it was remarkable how little hiss and noise was coming from the tape. 90% if the noise on those machines is the electronics.

90 min is fine too. I used to really treat the tapes with kid gloves in that I actively tried to keep the takes/overdub passes to a minimum and all that stuff. It's still a good idea, but not long ago I decided to push it and recorded like 5 or 6 full songs on a single tape, one after the other. Shitloads of takes/overdubs, flipping it over and recording backwards, flipping it back, working and reworking material on the same tape for weeks...just really trying to see how much the tape could handle before it started to sound bad. It never sounded bad. I've definitely had bad tape that sounded warbly or was overwound and got stretched or was left in the sun and got funky, but I have yet to overwork a tape on a 488. And I've REALLY tried. I'm sure it's possible, but they can take a lot. I always use Maxell XLII btw.

I had one that had a kinda weak erase head, or maybe just a lot of crosstalk. If I ever reused tape you could hear the old stuff bleeding through on the spaces between songs. Fucking underpainting! It's great. wouldn't change a thing. It's cool if people want to try to push the limits with the ancient, abused cassette decks to get the highest fidelity recording out of them, but I don't see the point. If you want clean hi fi recording, just use a computer. As a tool, what a cassette multitrack machine excels at is fast experimentation and getting nasty for fun. It's not like the "tape compression" from a cassette is some sought after secret tone. It was the MP3 of the 80's. Made for cheap distribution and easy reproduction on the consumer level. It wasn't ever considered a Professional format. When I see kids buying Cassette decks to run their FL Studio beats through for "Analog Processing" I squirm.