21 Jan
2019
21 Jan
'19
3:26 p.m.
On Mon, 2019-01-21 at 09:53 +0000, Jordan Muscott wrote:
Thanks to Jeremy, Will, Ralf and everyone else who
replied. I've tgken
it all onboard.
I've got a Yamaha-KX550 cassette deck which I'm happy with as the
source. I have to admit I'm not convinced an entry level sound device
won't be plagued by noise or other quality problems even if the
converters it has are decent, but I'm yet to decide how much money I
am prepared to spend :)
All the best,
Jordan.
You are welcome!
I found a review https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/yamaha/k-540.shtml.
It seems to be a pretty good tape deck.
It's a pity that it has got no bias adjust. My Yamaha MT44D also has got
no bias adjust, so I needed to test buy different cassettes and if one
was very good, I needed to visit the same shop again and buy a bunch of
cassettes from the same spread. OTOH I owned a cheap AIWA stereo tape
deck with a manual (not an automatic) bias adjust, IIRC it was not that
picky as the Yamaha 4-track, but IIRC still picky regarding the chosen
cassettes.
Regarding playback I wonder how old your tape cassettes are. I mastered
a lot on stereo cassette tapes as well as on DAT. I don't own a good
working cassette player anymore and no working DAT player at all. For
the analog tapes I wonder how much highs got lost and how audible the
"copy/crosstalk" effect is (I don't know what it is called, if you hear
the beginning of a song in the silence before the song, that is caused
by the winding, the reason that professional tapes are stored rewound).
And I wonder, if anything happened to the DAT tapes. Btw. if I should
find the time to borrow the professional DAT player from a friend, I
guess I would use AES/EBU of my RME card and the DAT player to copy the
DAT tapes to the PC. If the Linux driver shouldn't work, I would install
Windows. On Linux at least ADAT of my RME card is broken.