wow... what a heat sink, that's fantastic
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much for your help today we're looking at the Tascam da 88 and there's two things to
keep in mind while we go through this and you see how this was put together number one is at
one point in time in the 90s this was the biggest product Tascam had ever made the most successful
product in their lineup ever and that's because roughly between 1995 and 1999 they would sell 60
000 of these and that's even more impressive to me now that I've taken this one all the
way apart it's unbelievably well built and Incredibly modular built to be repaired and
this is almost exactly the opposite of how most stuff is built today if you're not familiar these
machines recorded using High eight tapes which on the left here you see one made by quanergy
and compare that to a DAT tape for a normal stereo dap machine on the right and at the time this was
an incredible cost savings over analog tape and you could string a bunch of these together to get
much higher Channel counts and the portability of the whole system at the time was an absolute
Game Changer now the story with this specific machine is it was dropped a couple of times it
looks like before it came to me the rear heatsink is pushed in towards the power supply both rack
rails are bent it has a number of errors and most importantly the tape drive mechanism is
filthy doesn't look like this machine saw a lot of Maintenance so compared to the other machines
I have that are serviceable this one has been in my collection for a number of years it's not
going to get repaired and the best thing to do is to salvage what I can from it at this point
and get the rest of the metal off to recycling so it can be turned back into something useful
oh that's cool as [ __ ] that just came off all in one with recycling in mind if there's
anything from this machine that you see and you could use or would like to have drop me
a message in the comments and we'll try to work something out and get you these parts because
I'd rather them go into a new project or into a repair than just into my parts bins or into
the recycling center so leave me a message if there's anything from this that you would like
all right foreign
so you can start to see just how modular everything is peeling back the front panel
and then the LCD display and now this board disconnecting it I'm fairly certain with the
remote that I have for this unit you could plug this back in and use it as
a black box front recorder without any of this everything that you're looking at here
seems to be to do with just the control panel and everything else functionally
with the machine is inside on its own board it's just really really well done
if you had any problem with any of these parts so much is socketed all the cabling
is on disconnects and I can imagine that this would have been a pleasure to work on
in its day compared to a lot of less well put together equipment oh look at the gunk foreign
it does seem like someone has been inside this machine before some of the screws are very loose
they all seem original there's nothing mismatched or weird it just seems like maybe it was serviced
in the past by a technician they don't build anything out of metal that thick anymore maybe
just regular servicing who knows what the actual history of this machine was but you can see I'm
just peeling back the layers basically I don't have a service manual or any specific order I'm
going in but knowing nothing about how this was put together it's fairly easy to see a logical
uh path to taking it all the way apart and if you were making a repair I don't think you'd have any
trouble whatsoever putting this all back together just by following the same kind of logical steps
although you'd want to keep much better track of the screws than I'm doing here of course
bam that's a smells like an old boat oh man the grunge the grunge it's so dirty
I thought I wasn't playing tapes with this one but
seriously
yes mattered on its own entire board that sandwiches into there so
and this is about the only place that there's any dead space inside these units and that's
underneath the tape drive behind the front control panels for the transport controls
and the rest of the machine is divided up pretty logically on the left hand side here
is all power supply and everything else processing wise is on the right
this one
now tell me what you think of this every component it seems in these has its own
metal tray it's like a custom mounting tray for every little thing I don't know if I've ever seen
another product with a cage like this around a simple fan this is not an expensive crazy
fan it's a Panasonic 12 volt fan uh but look at the cage they've put around it just to mount it
um incredible I'd love to know what you think if that was necessary I'm sure they had some
real justifications at the time because it could not have been cheap even in 1990s
money to build a product like this this thing is just absolutely built like a tank
epic all right
these things must get blazing hot
what a heat sink that's fantastic right these boys
dirty
these guys
nice that off I believe us are just hanging out
another grab a look
16 volt 25 volt
yeah that's crazy
oh that's a heavy boy so that's the power side completely disassembled and this Transformer
could come in handy in the future for something it's nicely labeled and laid out really easy to
repurpose since I've got all the correct wires so really neat and that is uh out of the way for
now and we're on to the other side of the unit all right I think at this point we can kick it up oops
and just like take everything out of the bottom
of course it is yes what a beast this thing is this is just incredibly cool
foreign
for anybody that wants a better look at these dcsoundup.com forward slash da88 and you'll
get the high-res images there so you can dig into exactly what's going on on these different boards
without digging into any real detail though you can see that each function of the machine has its
own board basically and each one of those boards can be pulled out for repair or swapped out in the
event of failure so you could imagine in a studio setting if one of many machines went down you'd be
able to have Parts on the Shelf to repair that quickly maybe a few hours to pull one of these
apart put a new board in and get going again I'm sure a skilled technician from the day could do
it much quicker than that even this top board allows you to connect the remote control that
was optional and also handled the sync inputs and outputs as well as the punch in foot switch input
this next unit allows you to connect the optional meter Bridge another expensive cable and optional
extra as well as being the only place where digital audio can be connected to this machine on
a titif connector we'll see a lot of real estate dedicated in just a few moments to the digital to
analog and anal log to digital conversion in this unit but if you're connecting digital audio stuff
that's already in the digital domain this is the card that's going to be doing that for you
this next board handles all of the integration that you might want to do with video or other
systems telling this machine when to start and stop so you can put this
machine into Chase mode you can do a number of different things that would integrate it
into a professional video environment of the day and that really was a big help for
anybody doing sound for film at the time these were wildly popular because they
were so simple albeit expensive and quite complicated by today's standards but they
were very simple at the time to integrate into an otherwise professional video editing system
and finally we come down to the input card the analog to digital conversion it takes unbalanced
RCA jacks or balanced on a db25 connector there and then you can see there's a double set an A
and A B input for each Channel and one of those is the balance the other is the unbalanced and
just so everybody's clear there is no mic pre involved here these are expecting line level
signal from a mixing board often that would be the direct outputs from Individual channels or
it could be from a mix bus that you'd be sending to a channel on this to record so you're getting
line level signal into these you are expected to bring your own microphone preamplifiers to
the party and finally we have the digital to analog output board again we see those outputs
mirrored A and B for balanced and unbalanced and a typical way you would have one of these machines
set up in a studio would be for the outputs to be connected back up to the Channel's B input
or alternate input so that way when you want to play back you flip the channel from the mic
pre input into playback mode so you're getting the signal back from the tape deck depending
on the console you're using there was always different nomenclature for those returns but
essentially you would have this connected back up to the same console that's feeding it so you
could listen to the tracks and then record on adjacent tracks and make a multi-track recording
so I hope this has been educational to see how one of these machines goes together and just
generally how Machines of that era were built and what the technology to record eight tracks
of digital audio looked like remember this is only eight tracks in this one machine you could
connect multiple machines together but all this did was eight tracks and you had to buy tapes to
make it do it there's no hard drives involved so it's an interesting look back at something
that was not that long ago and is a direct predecessor of what we do today as far as
a salvage effort is it worth it to pull these apart probably not honestly right now it's a
Friday it's a week before Christmas I would not put this on my list of things to do when I was
busy and it's certainly not going to be a money making Venture most of the components inside of
these are probably obsolete for any professional use but like I said before the there's anything
in here that you think you could use or put to use in a future project give me a shout we'll
try to work something out if the shipping is possible depending on where you're located and
which part you're after thanks so much for watching though this has been a lot of fun