I’ve done a ton of transfers recently on a Tascam 122mkIII that was just rebuilt. It has the XLR in/out board and I’m using that into a MOTU 16A.
I appreciate the output level control, but was surprised to discover the metered level is before the output level control, for better or worse. It took some experimenting to see where the tape recorder output electronics were overloading on hot tapes, comparing waveforms on the transfer side.
Azimuth - i have used a phase scope in software to assess, and it’s wild how much the top end will change, like tall grass in a breeze. I see the point of auto-azimuth now, and wonder what it looks like with a phase scope. For the most part the tapes I’ve done are stable beginning to end, but not all, and I’ve adjusted a few as it played. I knew the beginnings of tapes were almost universally bad, and a bunch of us tapers here way back agreed it was best to avoid the first 20-30 seconds of a tape for recording, and I mostly did. The occasions a tape starts from the leader have all been noticeably bad, and improve drastically in the first minute or so. I wonder if auto azimuth is able to ride that rodeo trick.
The argument for higher sample rate transfers: speed corrections in post sounding better.