Very Last Day Tascam MSR 16

[@Sciotube]

Good job Paul!!

[@vhm14u2c]

Pretty good, Paul!

[@Kyle-sg4rm]

Great stuff! Have you tried using VHS tape on it? I wonder about using 1/2" 16tr 16ch tape heads and part of a VCR tape transport, wired up to a cassette deck somehow. That would be amazing!

[@pcallas66]

I tried it and I figured it wouldn't hurt anything. It did record, but the levels were extremely low on playback. You need the correct tape formulation to get optimum performance on this. A six hour VHS tape gave you roughly 11 minutes of record time at 15 ips. The tape transport is just a little too rough on the VHS tape, too. This is a fantastic sounding deck.

[@Kyle-sg4rm]

@@pcallas66 Does the tape formulation and thickness of tape, etc, relate to how much juice needs to be provided to the heads? If so, does that mean that the reel-to-reel is providing less juice to the heads than a cassette deck does and that's why the levels were low? 11mins isn't long, but as VHS tapes can be found for quite cheap (especially when purchased in bulk), it's still seems worthwhile, although a 7.5ips option could be good for longer recording times. And yeah, I thought the reel-to-reel transport might be to rough for the relatively thin VHS tape. Which is why I really want to try this with the 1/2" 16tr 16ch heads and part of the VCR transport, wired up to a cassette deck. I'm just not sure what kinda power the heads would require for recording to VHS tape, or if those reel-to-reel heads would be most appropriate, or would some customised 1/2" 16tr 16ch heads be better?

[@Kyle-sg4rm]

@@pcallas66 Apart from part of the VCR tape transport, it may need to be built from scratch pretty much. It's strange that nobody has built and released such a machine, because it could make quality tape recording very accessible. I don't think it's because it wouldn't work. It's probably more about where collective companies decided to take the technology, knowing that it would eventually be almost completely replaced by digital recording technology. And VHS did come along nearer the end of analog audio/video dominance.

[@pcallas66]

@@Kyle-sg4rm I think the real trick is the biasing of the tape, and being this is only a two head machine, it would be very tricky to get it right because there's no playback reference as it's recording. If one would know how to do it, they could probably set it up to get the maximum signal on these tapes. The thing is I think at 7.5 ips, the frequency response is like 40 to 16 KHz and at 15 ips it's like 40 to 20 KHz, and the machine is set up for Ampex 456 tape from the factory. I'm not sure how the frequency response would be on the VHS tape once it would be set for maximum bias signal and if the signal would even be good enough to record with. Thank you for listening though. Bought this machine broken two years ago and I know how to repair some things on them, and lucky for me, it wasn't an expensive fix. There is actually another digital format (ADAT) that would use the SVHS tape and uses 8 tracks on an SVHS tape. I believe it's about 40 minutes of record time and the sound quality is fantastic. You can also gang more than one machine together and have them utilize smpte time code and you can put as many machines together and get up to 128 tracks (I'm not going to do the math, but I think you can put 16 machines together to achieve that). Anyway, as far as wiring it up to a cassette deck, you would only get two tracks, and it would only utilize 1/8 of the tape that you're trying to record on (I may be missing something here though). Incidentally, the track width on these tapes is the same track width of a cassette tape, except the tape is much thicker and has a nice transport system with dbx noise reduction. As you can hear, the sound quality is very good on this, but I made some other original recordings with this deck, too and you can find them on youtube as well. Anyway, have a great evening and I hope you find what you're looking for.