Are those stereo recordings summed to mono or they have been recorded in mono?
lmaooooo wow im a goon. i fucked up, accidentally was only monitoring the right channel in ableton. thanks for the heads up
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lol, apart from that check that your NAK heads are clean 'cause theres def something causing it to sound a bit muffled and out of focus, it shouldn’t!
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alright just updated em all in beautiful stereo and level matched a little bit (but now i think the nak is louder, its not scientific friends), made sure to include the characteristic pop at the stop of each WAR recording.
yeah im glad i did this comparison it really highlighted where the nak is falling short, the heads looked pretty clean and i even rubbed em down a bit, ill continue investigating.
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It makes a lot more sense now, thanks!
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No vested interest at all from me. But I love the NAK better. Sounds deeper and warmer.
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i do like the nak sound, but when im actually listening to it through the receiver i am boosting the highs ever so slightly.
you helped me realize i also recorded a whole mixtape of mine in mono in accident so now im gonna fix that too, fun experiment overall!
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sheesh, now that im rerecording my mixtape im noticing that the nak is running slow, this test was wildly all over the place.
my recording was pitched down a whole semitone, so this guy is draggin’
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I just saw this thought I would share, it seems to cheap to be a really good unit but it might do a job for somebody
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I’m all for more “walkmans” coming out. Hopefully it’ll inspire the quality to go up.
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Finally dragged out the Yamaha MT400 (an attic find gifted to me, what an amazing present!) after picking up some loop cassettes and it is so much fun, even just messing things up while figuring it out just pushes you places you wouldn’t ever get to normally. Plenty of scratchy pots but they’re already clearing up with a bit of use.
Also… anyone ever tried sending a gate signal to the punch input? Won’t be back home till much later to try it but can’t help wondering!
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Finally got my 8 tracks for a heck of a deal, hard to resist!
After some minimal servicing is now ready to be incorporated in my new setup. Can’t wait.
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Stumbled over another thread and got curious. Only in a very hypothetical phase right now since I don’t even have an album ready, nor do I sell my music anywhere. But still, cassettes. 
To those of you who are aleaady doing this, which parts of the work do you do yourself vs leave to services?
- Buying tapes
- Buying a tape deck recorder
- Buying cassettes
- Doing artwork
- DYI printing of inlets, adhesive labels on the cassette itself etc
What’s the quality bar to settle at, generally? Are 3-head decks a requirement or just snobbery? Do listeners even listen to the cassette or is that more of a thing to put on a shelf as a token? Lots of questions.
Oh, and I’m totally expecting this in the end, just so you don’t think I haven’t already imagined the finish line here:
I did it for a long time without a 3 head deck, the big difference is you can dial in you EQ live while listening to the tape and get the response you want as you get to listen to the actual tape live… it’s not required but if you care about quality it’s a huge workflow improvement, it’s not needed though as you can AB your recording EQ to dial it in, you still probably want a deck with good specs but really all you need to care about it type1 tape.
As far as my personal DIY I buy blanks pre wound to the length I want (actually just bulk 30 min tapes as I just like to release EP of that length) type1 music grade tape. This is pretty cheap. Then I also buy bulk stickers for the tapes and print my designs onto them. Print and cut my own jcards. I use a slightly different case type than a jewel case, it’s a soft more eco friendly plastic. I bought a paper stock I really love and have been using that for everything.
I had been using a laser printer for my releases but I think I am going to be moving to screen printing going forwards.
If you do go for a fully paid run of tapes there are some other things to still know, like even if you hire an artist they might not have experience with working with bleed in real work printing so it could be good to read up on it and double check that everything is within tolerance. (A lot of artist will be familiar with print).
I will conclude with I DIY the tapes because I enjoy it and it can keep the prices low, if you are looking for a way to make some merch and have a following that you think will enjoy it, paid runs probably makes more sense.
- adding one big bonus of doing DIY is you can push the tape into subtle compression if you want and play with the medium a bit more, while places that are doing as jobs expect you to send them something that is compressed enough for the dynamic range of tape, they aren’t there to make a call on how much they should push a tape into compression or whatever, they are there to make as good of a reproduction of what you send them as they can.
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Thanks for sharing your experience, it’s very helpful!
Interesting, I knew about the live monitoring part but always assumed that the quality of the recording would be inherently better too, live EQ:ing aside. Is this not true?
Any recommendations in general for a decent 2-head deck that does decent recordings? Perhaps better to ask that question if/when I have a particular model in mind though. 
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Mind if I ask you for a link to that? Trying to figure out what that looks like, if it’s just standard sized A4 prints that you cut manually or if three required more sophisticated printers. Thanks!
i’ve been using a Nakamichi BX100, the recording quality is perfectly fine for my uses. farther up in the thread there was some weirdness where there was some playback speed issues but those havent popped up again with my recent recordings. i dont know if this is a typical feature on 2-head decks, but you can monitor the input before recording to set levels appropriately, and it monitors while recording too. this is pre-tape monitoring i think? but its helpful
i recorded a mix i made to an old but unopened blank tape through the BX100, then i recorded the output back into Ableton. pretty clean i’d say
most recently i recorded over an old tape from the 60s with my own tracks. ill post the un-taped version of the first track on the mix for comparison. (my tracks already have tape simulation baked into themselves so its a little redundant)
i like how the tape tames the higher frequencies. thats an area where my tunes tend to go overboard so its nice to smudge out some of the piercing bits without taking away too much
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