Posted by Romeo Rondeau on 01/11/40 11:45

>>These machines are very unforgiving of poor maintenance.
>
>
> ADATs were unforgiving of good maintenance, which is why I haven't seen
> an one in a pro studio or remote in a decade. And everyone I used to
> have to deliver splits to on DA-88s told me to not bother at least five
> years ago. I don't even see them on remotes anymore.
>
> I know you get around a lot, Scott, but seriously, I haven't been
> involved in a project where a helical scan audio recorder was on any
> part of the chain in ages, and don't miss them. And when they broke
> it was never from poor maintenance (though the Tascams weren't a
> problem).
>
> I think "lots of people" isn't accurate.

I think that everyone in the industry knew that the MDM's were gonna be a
stop-gap solution at best. As flaky as HD's can be at times, they are still
better than the ADAT's and Tascams. I used 4 Tascam machines that were
running 15 hours every day (only 8 hours on Sunday.) We actually owned 6 of
them, because we could count on 2 of them either in route to Tascam or
coming back at all times. They were very susceptible to heat, and dust. The
DA-88 was designed with the cooling fan sucking air in through the
transport! Tascam unofficially advised us to turn the fans around and put a
vacuum filter over the fan air holes! This helped the dust but made them
real shaky on heat. They were not a lot of fun. I can't tell you how many
times I had to remove a tape from the transport with a couple of toothpicks
just so I could stuff it back into another machine and clone it. Sometimes
there were no dropouts, sometimes there were, we'd load it into the computer
and fix it up as best as we could. I heard a lot worse stories with ADAT's.
Our clients loved them however because the tapes were cheap and the
trackcount was high, not to mention being able to do alternate takes,
massive comps and still keep everything. All these things can be done easily
with a DAW.

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