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Gear / Technical Help => Recording Gear => Topic started by: Scooter123 on December 13, 2021, 11:02:49 PM
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Mine is toast, and it looks like the studio industry standard was a Tascam 122. So I can pick up a broken one for cheap and get it reworked at a local vintage equipment shop in Hollywood. Thoughts?
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Ideally the deck you use for transfers will be as similar as possible to the deck that was used for recording the originals. You should certainly supply a sample cassette to the repairer in order for him (or her!) to align the machine to the tape for optimum replay quality.
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Mine is toast, and it looks like the studio industry standard was a Tascam 122. So I can pick up a broken one for cheap and get it reworked at a local vintage equipment shop in Hollywood. Thoughts?
We use the 122 mkIIIs at work. You should be golden with one or two of those.
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In the past I found that the head alignment or azimuth of the playback deck to the most important. I would manually adjust it to match the source tape to get the best quality transfer. Even the same type of deck could (or more likely) have slight differences in head alignment.
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Today's often used playback decks of tapes recorded on old field recorders such as the Sony TC-D5M, or Marantz PMD430 are Nakamichi's with automatic playback azimuth such as the Dragon or CR7A. Some prefer the 582 or 680 series for their manual azimuth adjust on front face plate.
I agree with Ozpeter, if one could have the same deck the tapes were recorded on, serviced, in good working condition, and the azimuth set the way it was when you made the recording would be ideal.
I own two Nakamichi LX-5's and 2 CR5A's and take the doors off to do manual adjust.
The Tascam 122 was reliable back in the day and should be AOK if you have access to one that can be or is serviced. Remember, most of this stuff is 40 years old or so!!!
Let us know what you decide to do.
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Well I have a Tascam 122 on Craigslist for cheap and the guy will bargain. I have a vintage audio repair company in Hollywood that does all the work for Capitol and Westwood One, and I have used him multiple times before, so I guess the decision is
Tascam 122