Tascam Portastudio 414mkii - reducing hum

The Lounge Other Gear
#1

Anyone know how to reduce the hum in these tascam portastudio devices? I bought a furman power conditioner and it helped a bit, but there is an annoying hum and high pitch tone that drones on just above the noise floor. I know it’s the mixer making all the noise/hum and none of my other gear Is contributing, because if it take it out of the signal flow the sound is clean. My cables are all good and balanced.

I would like to use the tascam for recording/and as a mixer - although, it’s not optimal because it records the hum onto the cassette & I have to use izotope to take the hum out of the the digital recording version as well. If anyone has any tips or tricks on how to crush this noise/hum issue I’m all ears :ear:t5: Thanks :pray:

#2

I had a quick look around some forums on the internet and there seemed to be some consensus that other electrical gear near to the Tascam can interfere with it and cause excessive hum. Have you tried keeping it as far away from other electrical gear, phones, and WiFi as possible? I think some hum/noise is inevitable with old school tape machines tho, so ensuring you have high input signals is a good way to lessen their noisy qualities compared to the useful parts of the recording.

#3

Gotcha, yeah I figured it was kind of the older gear thing too. I have not tried the distancing thing as my studio does not allow for much of that (small), but I may be able to put it across the room more just to see if it’s picking up noise from the instruments or something. I am thinking there may be no pure fix to the problem, it’s super noisy. I mean cleaning it up with izotope is still cool - it’s sounds ok in the end - but I wish didn’t have to because I don’t like filtering out noise and hum out afterwards as sometimes it can effect the other sounds in the mix - even though izotope denoise is pretty much as clean as it gets.

It’s like when you invest a lot in synths with a low noise floor only to introduce noise and have to use a denoiser on the master track. I don’t like that, that kind of defeats the purpose. So I have a mackie coming in which I think should clean things up considerably, maybe I can move the tascam really far away and split off a stereo mix to it for cassette recording - I like the sounds of cassettes just without the noise. Distance may be the only solution unless someone has a better one I have never heard of. Yes even when I crank the level it into the tascam you can still hear a whistle at around 5-8k and a lot of noise, it’s better, but it’s still there.