Tascam 246 Recording Tutorial - the making of Anyone For Tennis 

Thanks for the encouragement, I'm glad I could help.

Thanks, I'll check those out

I appreciate that!

Hey, the only bottlenecks I've come across (apart from magnetic heads not being manufactured any more and short supply for control chips for motors, which you probably already know are potential pitfalls when buying any cassette multitracker) is I've had a few where the control board which faces you when you take the back case off developes a fault so one or more tracks won't arm and/or the power doesn't get past that board to the second control board below which is attached to the counter so it won't light up. It's been hard for me to fix a) because I haven't got very good at fixing stuff with lots of logic gates on it yet and b) that board is double sided which is unusual in multitrackers and it makes desoldering slow and difficult. One day when I fix a 246 with that issue I have in a cupboard here it'll be the subject of a video. But the record playback boards are easier to get to compared to a 244 and everything else is similar to a 244 - chunky and a pleasure to work with.

@@Tetrakan i appreciate all that. i'll have to look at this again when I open this 246 up. guy said it was totally cool just a little weirdness on playback. nope. tries to play for 2 seconds then stops. oy

Replace all the rubber (belts pinch roller and idler tires) and try again. If it’s still stopping after 2 seconds check the counter is ascending, could be a dirty sensor. Its a really nice blend of features on that model, I hope that once the two of you settle your initial differences you will be very happy together.

In a way I'm a bad person to ask this because a large part of why I'm recording with simple, relatively low fidelity tape machines is to avoid the sort of agonising over options I associate with having loads of musical hardware and software, and as such I have an abnormally high tolerance for the sort of aural artefacts that would constitute shoddy workmanship on the part of a BBC engineer. With that in mind, take these two morsels of advice with a pinch of salt - 1) Calibrate your machine. If you're at all concerned with fidelity then you want to make sure you're not getting crap gain structure and therefore less headroom and more hiss and more or less tape saturation than you think because your meters are off by 2Db and your record trim pots are adding completely different levels of gain to their neighbours. 2) I love/accept the limitations of the unbalanced preamps and two- band parametric mids on the 246 but having no shelving EQs, relatively little gain and no XLRs are among the 246's most obvious shortcomings, so get an external mixer with transformer based preamps and high and low shelving EQs and use this as you preamp into the receive jack of the inert ports on the 246. The teac ones from the early 80s are still relatively cheap and would work well for this purpose. The preamps will be clearer if you like that sort of thing, provide more gain, you can compensate for the attenuation of high frequencies on the cassette format by boosting high end by a couple of Dbs while you track and carve off rumble in instruments with not much high end (female vox, violin) with the low pass. Apart from that, anything else you're doing is probably fine, don't over think it, allow yourself leeway to make some crappy mixes to learn the machine, thanks fro watching!

@@Tetrakan Brilliant! Thanks so much for taking the time with this response, that's really valuable advice. I've seen your videos on calbibration and I'm definiitly going to follow them before I do any more recording. I don't know if bad calibration could make bouncing down result in an unuseably low level on the "target" track, but I've had real problems with that, and ended up sending the recorded tracks out through the FX send and back in to an input to bounce down to one track. That worked fine (and allowed me to run it through a compressor and EQ, which was handy) but I've always been disappointed that bouncing internally seems to result in a weak recorded signal. I've got some clean preamps which I was already thinking of using because they come with phantom power and polarity reverse, which makes the front end a lot more flexible. Is the rationale for connecting via inserts instead of the normal inputs to bypass the preamp completely? And do the preamps colour the sound even all the way to the left which is nominally "line"? Thanks again for what you do. You're making the world a better place - at least a tiny corner of it!

If your unit is calibrated and the tape is okay then if your bounced signal looked like it was at 0Db during tracking, the recorded bpunce should play back at 0 Db plus or minus 1Db. Yes, using an external preamp onto the insert return bypasses the 246's internal preamps completely. The change to sound the internal preamp makes is subtler the further left you set it, but it'll be doing something to the sound - I don't have that mindset but the purist rationale for audio is let the signal pass through as few and as high quality gain stages as possible...I like the internal Tascam preamps the same way I like Polaroid photos and SNES video games even though higher fidelity alternatives exist, but there are definitely higher gain, lower noise floor, smoother saturation preamps you could hook up to the portastudio if that was important to you.

@@Tetrakan awesome, thanks again 🙏

Sounds high to ne but then im a UK resident These things are obsolete so they exist in a volatile second hand market, and regional availability is going to effect the whole supply/demand dynamic. Best thing is to search for completed listing on Canadian ebay, see what they sold for in the last 12 months.

@@Tetrakan I found a Yamaha mt400 for under 300 so I'm happy (and less poor)

Good unit. Definitely a better deal. Happy recording!

I've got some larger format reel to reel recorders in my home recording studio - a Tacam 388, 38, and 32B. So I'll be doing some tear downs, tutorials, and demos using those units eventually. More large format stuff may follow, but the space it takes up is an issue.

@@Tetrakan cool... have you ever done a Fostex B-16 I'm looking for someone that can look at it and tell me what it needs. I've had it for about 7 years. I cleaned it.. turned it on and everything seems to be fine. I want it looked over, no one in the professional world want's to touch it. Every one only wants to work with what they are already know. If ever you want to take a crack at it, when you have the room and time let me know how much you would charge me to look it over and if it needs any work. Let me know how much you would charge me for that also. thanks for your time very cool videos. I have a Tascam midi 644 that I have fixed and a Tascam 238 that works perfectly! The Fostex is the only one that I have not been able to get back and going and I really don't want to take a jab at it and mess something up. Thanks for your time

Thanks. So long as you're only ever going to play back the recordings on that unit it should be fine. If you needed to play them back on another multitracker I suppose there's a risk that - depending on how the 234 and the other unit were calibrated - the other unit won't play the cassette as fast, and therefore the recording will sound slightly flat , like cents below concert pitch.

@@Tetrakan thanks for the reply. yeah it's interesting doing a lot of experiments with it. it seems like using an outboard preamp but going through instrument jack rather than line level sounds best. probably because going through the circuitry is where a lot of the magic is, just plugging direct to line from my preamp didn't sound as beefy and good for some reason. just bought a teac 2a mixer that a lot of people say sucks, ha we'll see it was just a recommended from the actual manuel for the 234 which of course is very old school

Usually "audio interface" means what you use for a computer - digital to analogue conversion etc - so I'm not sure what you mean...an external preamp? Or cable converter? Other than appropriate cable converters (the 246 only has 1/4" input sockets but some of my equipment has XLR or 1/8" output sockets) I didn't use any external preamp, DI box or anything like that. Unless you need phantom power, an external preamp is not necessary.

Hello, I'm not taking on repair work, but this sounds like a calibration issue you can rectify at least partly without specialist equipment: On each tape track the signal passes through a record amplifier on the way to the cassette and a playback amplifier on the way back from the cassette - if the gain of either or both amplifiers is off specification you can get a gap between levels like you describe. Here is a video demonstrating the process on a 244, the location of the trimpots is different on your 246 but the principles are the same...you can do a rough approximation of the process without a level calibration tape by using a loud passage of any prerecorded tape to ensure the playback amps are somewhat loud and even, so peaking in the the -3 to 0 dB region. You can also roughly match the vu sensitivity using any even signal such as a synth with one key held down. Good luck! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vNCSR447M5o.html

@@Tetrakan Thank you so much for the quick reply! I found the 246 service manual and made a note to experiment with the trimpot... now I will definitely give that a shot now that I'm reassured that I don't necessarily need a test tape... didn't occur to me to use an external sound meter. I will check out the video, first. Again, thanks for the advice! If this is all it is, I got a good deal on a cool bit of gear :)

Is the buzz coming from the unit itself? (As opposed to through the headphones it speakers) if so it could be your control belt needs replaced. It's more or less the same cassette player as the 244 and I have a long series of videos about fixing that, see my channel home page for the 244 playlist

@@Tetrakan yes it’s coming from the machine whenever I turn it on. Thank you I’ll check out your videos and see what I can do

Mine makes a slight audible hum (the motor) but it’s not too loud. Is this normal?

Yeah, even with all the belts in place, they're not totally silent. It should be quieter with no cassette in it, because the cassette shell shuts a switch which turns on one of the three motors.

If condition and calibration are identical, they should sound indistinguishable IMO