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It was only a a little over 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
doodling around!
Then...... along came Digital...
Early in the digital days, 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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