![]() I also owned an 8T recorder for a while back then, bought blanks and recorded for use in the car. More than once, I actually unrolled an entire tape on the living room floor and rewound it loosely, which would buy me a few more plays before it would happen again. Once the lubricant dried out, the tape would jam and hang, stretch and be "eaten". Some tapes had a metal spring with a felt pad, similar to a cassette but much larger, which avoided this problem completely.Īnother issue was the tape itself, which was coated with lubricant so that it could feed smoothly out of the center of the reel (see photo in the link above). I'm not affiliated with him but this guy does this still today We would take out the flywheel and insert it into a small device hooked up to an air compressor, which would blow grit at the capstan while we rotated it and resurfaced it. Company, we had a sandblaster for the flywheel capstans. Back in the mid-70s when I worked at Teledyne Svc. I tried C90's and found that even with a '86 XLII I had a couple dropouts.Foam pads that disintegrated and turned into goo or powder, gumming up the works. The other thing is that you need to use the best tapes and only 60 minutes or under in length. It's hell to learn, as it has a digital routing mixer and you create "scenes" which you can recall and personalize, and I did have trouble getting it down but once you do it's really fun. ![]() I wouldn't want to have to repair one of those. It's a beast, probably weighs around 40 lbs, but for that price I would jump on it. The meter bridge is really cool on the 688 and the eq is surprisingly good. The reason for this is because you won't have to bounce (usually) on the 688 where I always find myself bouncing at least once on any 4-track I use. The dbx is a must with such narrow track widths but the sound is pretty close to the 424. I recorded the song "Under Fluorescents" off my new album with mine. It's a really well-built and versatile machine. If you can buy a working 688 for $300 I would say go for it. Having said that, they're obviously not the only machines out there and models like the Marantz PMD740, Tascam 424 MKII, and III, and the aforementioned 234 will give you similar results at the end of the day. I've never had any problems finding parts for both my 244, and 246, and once fixed, they both have been performing great. The more people still using and selling these machines, the better you'll be when something goes wrong (and believe me, something will go wrong when using a 30+ year old piece of consumer gear like this.) When Tascam was still supplying things like belts and pinch roller wheels for these things, then it wasn't an issue, but today you're at the mercy of dubious sellers on eBay or if you're lucky, a reputable seller of belts and parts. I don't think it's any better or worse than the 246, just wasn't as popular when they were being sold so again, finding parts will be a problem. The 234 is a nice machine, built like a tank. No other cassette Porta has all that, but like I said, a lot of the design was proprietary and I had to spend almost $350 to get just two of it's channels repaired, and if something goes wrong then I'm scouring the Earth to find a part lol! I consider The Audio Technica RMX64 one of, if not THE BEST cassette multitrack machine ever made.It's got a mixer section designed by Neotek, both Dolby B, and C noise reduction, full +48v phantom power available on all 6 channels, and a direct drive capstan in a transport that can switch from regular to double tape speed (plus switch between 4-track, and regular 2-track stereo.) All that in a machine that retailed for almost $1200 in 1986! I actually found a working Audio Technica RMX64 off the comments section of that site. Serviced machines go for around $600-$800 these days but you can always find one in good shape for cheap and get it repaired by a qualified tech and it'll run for a long time. You won't be able to just buy one of these and have it run like you want it to. Tascam had the cassette multitrack game down, and the units they put out in the early to mid 80's can still run great with a little work.Ī couple hundred dollars isn't going to do it though. ![]() Without NOS parts, and available parts machines you can have a really nice 4-track and not be able to use it correctly. That, to me, is the factor for getting a nice machine and having it perform at it's peak. There were other machines out back in the 80's when this one came out, that are just as good, if not better, but they weren't produced in the numbers that the 246 (and 244) were (meaning there aren't as many available parts out there.) From my experience, as I use these a lot, the Tascam 246 is probably the best 4-track you can get NOW. There's a couple threads about this subject on other forums like Homercording and Gearslutz.
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