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Author Topic: Field recorder - for Portastudio style recording  (Read 7458 times)

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Offline Gutbucket

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Re: Field recorder - for Portastudio style recording
« Reply #15 on: March 17, 2017, 12:51:24 PM »
The "Portastudio-like" offerings from Zoom- https://www.zoom-na.com/products/production-recording/multi-track-recorders

Looks like Yamaha has exited this market.
musical volition > vibrations > voltages > numeric values > voltages > vibrations> virtual teleportation time-machine experience
Better recording made easy - >>Improved PAS table<< | Made excellent- >>click here to download the Oddball Microphone Technique illustrated PDF booklet<< (note: This is a 1st draft, now several years old and in need of revision!  Stay tuned)

Offline Torsken

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Re: Field recorder - for Portastudio style recording
« Reply #16 on: March 17, 2017, 05:25:03 PM »
They do.  Tascam (who introduced the original cassette Portastudio way back when) offers digital Portastudios today- http://tascam.com/products/mtr_digital_portastudio/

Those substitute a digital system recording to a memory card instead of the old analog systems recording to cassette. You essentially get the same user experience, but with far greater quality and flexibility, plus way more tracks and editing features built in.. go nuts.

Not really the same..
In spite of the hiss and the limitations vs a digital unit, tape compression sounds nice and musical to me. Some of those old machnes had inputs for ext. effects too. These new ones are adequate for demos I guess, but lack the mojo of tape and also the higher quality sound of a e.g. Sound devices.  I'm not too tempted by 'em, - I wish I where though. Check out this great sounding home cassette recording:  https://youtu.be/yfdPfsYlgck. I really doubt that these new models can produce this.

For something complety different, Kodak have made a new Super 8 film camera. http://www.kodak.com/US/en/Consumer/Products/Super8/Super8-camera/default.htm
Call me crazy, but I really do believe that a lot of people would sacrifice the digital ease of use for a convenient new multitrack tape recorder that sounds great. Music lovers of the world LOVES the sound of tape! It's just that these mega corporations move like huge oil tankers on the ocean, very slow and steady with hardly any turns. It's a bit depressing how underwhelmed they make us with their new products. So little fresh and new stuff. Smaller manufacturers do come up with cool stuff, but they lack the founds so these news gets super expensive to develop.

Sorry if I sound negative, I'm just a bit dissapointed of what is on offer.


Offline Gutbucket

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Re: Field recorder - for Portastudio style recording
« Reply #17 on: March 20, 2017, 01:44:12 PM »
Eh.

The bigger ones have dedicated effects sends and returns, the smaller ones have line-outs which can be used as effects sends along with their inputs.  Just mix down from the digital portastudio to cassette, or patch through an old 3-head cassette tape-deck monitor loop if that's the effect you want. 

Sort of ironic that youtube recording is all early-era digital computer sequences recorded to cassette isn't it?  Not overly hard to capture that kind of thing with the limited fidelity of cassette, and the lo-fi tape 'sweetening' helps smooth the coarse lo-fi computer digital sound.  I don't see that as much of a proof of "goodness" given the material, and more an indication that the content was so limited to begin with that it actually fit pretty well within the limited fidelity of the portastudio/cassette medium.  I'm not bashing the content itself on aesthetic grounds, only drawing attention to it's deficiencies as an example of cassette/portastudio quality.

I'm of the cassette era.  Except for the mix tape, which is cassette's true artistic use, cassette pretty much sucked, and pretty much always did although it became relatively good given it's starting point.  I loved it, but except for mix tapes it's pretty much better off dead. It's inherently crippled low-fi medium. As an effect, well okay, but even that can be done better (and with less cost and effort) digitally these days. If "tape sound" is what I was after I'd probably use a digital 'tape effect' plugin after the recording was made where I have far better control over what and exactly how much.  I made loads of 4-track cassette stuff back in the 80's and 90's using various Yamaha and Tascam machines,  I still have the 4-track cassettes and the 2-channel cassette mixdown masters somewhere, some on fancy metal chrome tape DBX encoded..

And before that I grew up spending all my time making super-8 movies, cutting & splicing film, doing stop-action animation, scratch modifying and colorizing negatives, modifying cameras to change frame rate, and all kinds of home-brewed film effects.  Years later I had a black and white pixel-vision audio cassette based video camera - that was fun because it was so incredibly crappy!  I still have those cassettes somewhere too.

The real key as I see it for small independent producers is less about the inherent aesthetic of these media than what they enabled the creator to do - the way they influence the work and the decision making process.  I fully accept your initial argument along those lines.  But I reject the argument made on aesthetics.  That's only really relevant for big money productions where cost isn't an issue in doing things in expensive archaic ways for some incremental aesthetic gain, 90% of which can be done on the cheap by an independent far more easily in the modern digital era.  Early tech always sucks, and early consumer tape based video was terrible.  But what was way worse than the crappy video esthetic was that for couple decades, video effectively killed (or at least vastly altered) the creative process which had included all those cool things we were doing with film-based super-8.  Early digital audio recording didn't suffer quite as badly, partly because it was still integrated with analog workflows for a long time, yet now we can pretty much do digitally what we use to do analog, for both video and audio.  True, it took a while to get here, but it's becoming harder and harder to make the aesthetic argument even for money backed commercial creators.
musical volition > vibrations > voltages > numeric values > voltages > vibrations> virtual teleportation time-machine experience
Better recording made easy - >>Improved PAS table<< | Made excellent- >>click here to download the Oddball Microphone Technique illustrated PDF booklet<< (note: This is a 1st draft, now several years old and in need of revision!  Stay tuned)

Offline Life In Rewind

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Re: Field recorder - for Portastudio style recording
« Reply #18 on: March 20, 2017, 01:50:41 PM »
For the OP - you might find this little experiment I did a few years ago interesting...

http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=156713.msg1977871

Offline Blakeq

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Re: Field recorder - for Portastudio style recording
« Reply #19 on: April 01, 2017, 01:42:12 PM »

http://www.getolympus.com/us/en/ls-100.html



That seems to meet your requirements.



So, I wanna be able to do high quality field recordings AND have a unit for recording music - layering tracks "sound on sound"

Wishes:
  • great sounding pres and condenser mics
  • rechargable battery (not a deal breaker but they all should just do this..)
  • Multitracker "Portastudio style"
  • XLR/jack inputs
  • Userfriendly
  • SD card storage


Thanks for your advice  :)

 

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