Back in the late 1980’s, long before the days of Pro-Tools and Cubase multi-track recording, manufactures were trying to squeeze every possible ounce of usefulness out of existing analogue technology. Professional multi-track tape recording had been around for a number of years, most famously the 4-track recordings of the Beatles Sgt Pepper album at Abbey Road studios in the mid 1960s.
By the early 1970s 8 and 16 track machines were common place in most recording studios, in Decca’s West Hampstead studios, studio 2 (mostly used for groups and small bands) was equipped with a Scully 8 track machine, and after it’s refurbishment in 1973, the giant studio 3 (mainly used for large orchestras) was equipped with a 3M 16-track machine. In the 1980’s manufacturers for the domestic market, home studios and demo recordists produced various types of 4 track tape machines and ultimately 8 track too.
Tascam 238S
Some were reel to reel machines but most were based around the Philips Compact Cassette format.
The machine shown here was made by Tascam – the 238S – and was manufactured around 1988. The fact that the deck was made for a cassette meant this was cheap to run and gave very good results. The deck ran at 3¾ inches per second, and would use high bias type II tapes. The heads were aligned to interleave the 8 tracks with even tracks grouped together and odd tracks grouped together this meant that the full width of the tape was used allowing only one pass of the tape – there was no side 2. The deck incorporated Dolby S that provided 10dB of noise reduction at low frequencies and 24dB of noise reduction at high frequencies. These combinations of good quality tapes, a faster tape speed and Dolby S gave some very good recordings. Added to its impressive pedigree was dbx, which was a wide band compression-expansion system that provided a net noise reduction system (dealing with broadband noise not just tape hiss). In effect the dbx system could give a 90 dB dynamic range very impressive for a small cassette. This one seen here in our studio has seen plenty of active service and in its lifetime I have used it to record many choirs, bands and a variety of singers. In my opinion this was the ultimate machine for squeezing the best out of the humble cassette.
The 1990s then saw the production of many digital tape machines, Tascam famous for the DA-88 in 1992 supported 16 bit/48kHz format recording onto Hi8 tapes. This technology has come along was with Tascam’s latest machine, the DR-680, offering 24 track capacity at 96kHz/24 bit recording onto an SD card.
