It was only a decade ago that the
only way to make your own recordings on a low budget was to get some kind of multitrack
cassette deck or open reel tape recorder (like the good ol' Tascam A-3340S - remember
those?). It's really hard to make a decent sounding recording with a 4-track cassette deck
because of the inherently poor audio quality of the mid-1960's vintage, 1-7/8
inches-per-second Compact-Cassette medium (slow tape speed + skinny tape = high noise +
high distortion).
Open reel tape decks offer much better sound quality than
cassettes (many would say better than anything else!), but require a lot of maintenance
and use up a lot of expensive analog tape at the preferred tape speeds of 15 or 30
inches-per-second. Editing is also difficult on analog tape, requiring pinpoint precision
with a razor blade and editing block. This is not a skill one learns in an hour or two of
noodling around!
And along came Digital...
A few years
ago, Alesis came out with the ADAT, an 8-track digital tape recorder that
uses S-VHS videocassette tapes. The latest models are the ADAT XT20 and LX20. Tascam
responded to the ADAT's success by introducing the DA-88, which is very
similar to an ADAT but uses Hi-8 videocassettes instead of S-VHS. These Modular
Digital Multitrack (MDM) recorders have become the standard
multitrack recorders for project studios and home studios. The Tascam DA-88 and it's
successors (the budget DA-38, and the new top of the line DA-98)
are more popular in the broadcast industry, while the Alesis ADAT is primarily used in
musicians' home studios and in small project studios. The new Alesis ADAT XT20's 20-bit
Analog-to-Digital Converters are reputed to sound significantly better than the older
models, but all ADAT's are limited to 48 minutes of recording time on a single tape. The
Tascam MDM's have "only" 18-bit Analog-to-Digital Converters, but have the
advantage of being able to record up to 113 minutes on a single tape (better for recording
live concerts). Note that audio CD's have a 16-bit 44.1kHz resolution, so both types of
MDM are capable of better-than-CD sound quality. It's quite common to fly the 8 tracks of
digital audio from the ADAT into a computer to mix down entirely in the digital
domain, and then burn a CD of the final mix. This process keeps the signal entirely
in the digital domain from the Analog-to-Digital Converters at the ADAT's inputs to the
Digital-to-Analog Converters at the outputs of the listener's CD player.
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And Along
Came Digital...
