greetings earthlings my name is bandru and sometimes I have really stupid ideas this is one
of those ideas today we're recording a podcast to tape for this experiment which I actually recorded
over a year ago I am going to be running the shure sm7b into a FET head then into the Rupert Neve
portico 5017 then into the Yamaha mg 10x you and lastly that will be run into the tascam porta o to
now as I just mentioned we are using the tascam mini studio porta o 2 which is a cassette based
four-track recorder and we will need a cassette to record - and there are 4 different types of
cassettes I have seen them listed as type 0 1 2 & 4 & elsewhere I have seen them listed as type
1 2 3 & 4 all of these cassettes are made of different materials and therefore they have a
different signal to noise ratio and I learned this the hard way by buying a type 4 cassette
which is supposed to have the best signal-to-noise ratio only then to read the manual from the porter
Oh - and find out that it only works with type 2 cassettes and I suppose that will give us a little
bit more of that cassette noise and cassette charm and maybe cassette saturation if that's a thing
now a very brief history of these home studio 4-track recorders they were first released by
tascam which is a division of Teac and the first model was the t AK 144 which was released in 1979
at AES or the Audio Engineering Society and tascam continued to make these devices all
the way up through the 80s 90s and even the early 2000s but now they have moved away from
the cassette based for track recorders and have gone to digital multitrack recorders
now let's talk about how one of these devices is able to give you four individual tracks on a
cassette tape well a standard cassette actually has four tracks on it but they're not typically
all used at the same time only two tracks are played back at once in most cases and this is
because a tape has to have two sides to it with a standard commercial cassette you have side
one which has a stereo pair of tracks making up track one and two and then on side two or side B
you also have a set of stereo tracks which will make up tracks three and four so in a standard
cassette deck the playhead will only cover two of the tracks which is why you have to flip a tape
over in the deck to play the second side but then you have these four track home studio recorders
which have play heads that will allow you to playback or record all four tracks that are on
the cassette and I do want to note that since you are recording all four tracks and the play heads
access all four of those tracks you can only use one side of the cassette you don't get side a and
B now let's go ahead and rewind about four years to the time when I was actually recording this
we're going to connect the line outputs from the knees and run that over XLR to quarter inch into
the Yamaha then I'm going to run the stereo quarter-inch outputs from the Yamaha into line
1 and line 2 of the tascam what do we do now we need to connect a microphone are we still good
that sucks a big bag of dongs so we're running the shure sm7b obviously over XLR to XLR okay keep the
headphones off well I'm powering everything on don't want to blow my ears out hello hello okay
not getting any signal probably because we don't have phantom power turned on so we have this on
not getting any levels that's a problem oh you know what I went this route before and now we
are getting levels actually let's go ahead and do a very quick recording and then I'll show you how
I'm going to transfer this over to the computer so this is how the voice sounds running through the
Neve to the Yamaha mg 10x see you then into the port of studio so here's how we're going to copy
the files over I got RCA to RCA cables I'm going to run line output from the back of the tascam
into channels 5 and 6 on the Yamaha mg 10 xeu and when I am transferring this I am going to mute all
the other tracks so there's no other interference and here you can see me playing the tape back and
recording the mg 10 Xu in an audio hijack session to capture the audio digitally and get that ready
to edit in my nonlinear editor right here I am using a phonic leveling software to set the level
of the tape cassette recording to negative 15 lufs to ensure that the podcast is at a decent level
I am NOT doing any noise removal or processing or compression it has all of the imperfections
of the cassette this is just to get it at a normalized level I better get started recording
this because it's 11 a.m. and it's gonna take exponentially more time to get this done because
I have to capture the cassette in real time I can't say okay go ahead and bounce it I have
to wait for this to playback all the way through and I'm going to start with a new tape so let's
go ahead and do that first no wonder tapes just stopped being popular they're nightmares to open
now right here is where I really started to run into a problem I imported my audio
to Final Cut Pro dropped it into my multicam file and then I realized that there was quite
a bit of drift on this recording and that's likely because the playback speed of this
cassette deck is nowhere near as consistent or reliable as a computer's internal clock
then in order to resolve that issue I would have to chop the audio every minute or two
and then resync it so it got to be a little bit tedious and it is not perfectly in sync
but that's what I get for using a cassette tech to record a podcast and try to sync it to video
that idiot sucks it pubsey or something I dressed up like the main character which is a woman this
is a really fun video for me to make and I was so excited to do that do you even podcast why are you
reviewing microphone so you don't even use them in the real world I think that's important as a
podcaster I don't think enough people practice I think people just just jump on a microphone and
say oh my god so in conclusion the audio quality that we got from recording our podcast direct to
tape was about as bad as you would expect it was noisy it was dark it was over driven sounding
but to be fair I thought the intro music had this added level of charm and character to it
by running it through the cassette adding that noise adding that cassette compression if that's
even a thing I just thought it sounded really cool and I honestly think that's why we still
see some artists today releasing their albums on cassette because it does have this character that
is completely lost you can't even properly emulate it with a plug-in and by releasing that music on
cassette it's reintroducing that character and that character is becoming a part of the music but
if you're considering picking up one of these four track cassette recorders to record your podcast to
or record audio for a video to please reconsider digital recording has come so far it sounds
exponentially better and it is so much easier to work with because it records at a consistent rate
and you don't have to worry about playback speed or your audio drifting but that was a really fun
experiment for me to do and I hope you enjoyed that half as much as I did I know it's not logical
it's not something anybody is going to do it's just something I was curious about so there you
have it that is what happens when you record your podcast to tape if you're wondering why I
look so much worse so much more rotund than I did in the initial portion of this video it's because
I just stumbled across this video project a year after I started it completely forgot I did that
I thought I would record an outro and put this out at the beginning of 2020 as a way to start off the
year if you do want to hear the entire podcast that was recorded to cassette I will link that
in the upper corner and I will also have a link to the podcast that was recorded directly to my
computer so you can hear the real differences between them and before I sign off just a quick
and to everybody who is still watching you may want to head over to podcast.com slash giveaways
and you might be able to enter to win some free stuff if you found this video fun interesting
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you so dang much until next time thank you so much for watching thank you so much for listening bye