Panasonic Tape Deck 1970’s - AMAZING SOUNDING UNIT! - Killer Analog Studio Tool! - Lines In/Out - CL

Look at this beauty! Everything about it is so inspiring, makes me want to record! I’m a huge analog tape enthusiast. I love getting off the computer and recording straight to tape for the inaugural track of a new song. When a song starts on tape the whole song will take on the pace and character of tape, beautiful imperfections and all. I can’t tell you how many times where I’ve struggled to get takes to digital, been kinda weirded out by the glow of the monitor, and then put the whole thing in analog and got it right away. It’s really cool when there’s one option and it’s to play it right, and that’s when you just play it right. It’s like when you have to dig in your brain to remember another language you used to study because your phone is dead and you can’t use google translate, you just try until you get it and then you just get it. Some call this the “old school” way of recording, and there is most definitely some absolute truth to the process. This unit works super well as a recording tool, and if you want a really awesome hifi way to listen to albums on tape it also totally kills for that. There’s two inputs to record, you can run in an entire mixer of drum mics and do a stereo R/L thing and it will sound amazing. I recorded some guitar line in with my pedals and a Humboldt Simplifier amp simulator, and it sounded just so good. There’s RCA lines in and out that you can use to go back and forth between your interface. You can run any mixer from a table top 2 input Berhinger all the way up to a Neve console into the RCA Ins and Outs into the back of this thing, and there is your tape print. I've recorded two mics into a mixer and then directly into this, one on acoustic and one on voice, and it sounds fantastic. The sky is the limit with what you can do when it comes to lining in an outboard mixer, it would be a cool unit to mic an entire band live with and try to get a real live old school take with, back when the only option was to play good all together when the tape was rolling. I've done that before with bands and there is a zen that occurs in the absence of the computer, the room feels different while you're playing to tape. I’ve used every tape machine Tascam, Teac, and Panasonic has ever made, and this one sounds just as good if not better than the best of them. I did the drums of my last EP on a Tascam 246, and this machine has all the amazing punch and clarity that that one had. It sounds really similar to a 244 which is definitely a fan-favorite in the Tascam tape world. Everything works beautifully, it records and plays back like a dream. The onboard Dolby noise reduction is awesome, there’s all kinds of tricks you can do with that where you leave it on for recording/off for bouncing down and vice versa. There’s cool effects that can happen when that goes down. If you just want to use this as a hifi tape player for your home stereo, I bet this will be one of the best sounding tape machines out there for that purpose. I listened to an original tape of Damn the Torpedos and it sounded so good. There’s a few minor aesthetic things here and there, but you can see that it’s in great shape. Amazing tape machine and great studio tool!