If you're looking for a Tascam Portastudio for 4-track recording onto cassette tape with a premium mixer, I'd look at the 246, however being older might present more maintenance issues to find or get to peak performance. I think the word I was looking for was "mud". what do you achieve? You're crowding those selected frequencies. Just think, if you have 8 channels input into the mixer and you boost 12kHz and 100Hz on every channel. sweepable EQ is that a sweepable EQ helps you dial in on the sweet spot of the source sound, where a fixed EQ on many channels, boost or cut, if overused would tend to turn the sound to. Not the end of the world, but it is what it is. The Mackie has more of nearly everything, however the 3-band EQ on the 1402 is still fixed frequency shelving EQ. I've never used or heard the 1402- VLZ3 mixer, so I can't compare directly, but looking at the features it's more like comparing apples & oranges. Is that a lot of words that ultimately say nothing? Figures! I've gotten a wide variety of quality Type II tapes and they are all basically acceptable. For the guys who really scrutinize subtle differences between brands of Type II tapes, go visit Tapeheads dot net. You will get a "tape" analog sound from both. They both have their proper niche to fill. 414mkII's usually go for a lot less than 424mkII's. The tape recording quality from both on High speed will be very similar. They may both be used as a stereo mixer in any signal chain, less the tape drive section. With that being said, the differences are subtle. The 424mkII has a good design and lots of features, while the 414mkII has almost the same feature set in a smaller footprint, but obviously some smaller feature sets on some key items such as XLR inputs, the kind of meter, no Normal speed and only 2 band EQ. The size difference is not that dramatic.
#TASCAM 424 MKII VS 414 MKII FULL#
The 414mkII is meant to be a bit smaller & compact, while the 424mkII is meant to be more full featured. I think the difference in the sound quality you get between the 414mkii and 424mkII is that the 424mkII's EQ is 3-band with the mid band sweepable, which enables you to dial in the EQ sweet spot for each channel/instrument/input. The 424 gives a 5/6 and 7/8 inputs on separate TS 1/4" connectors which can be handy, but to get the 5/6 and 7/8 input pairs in stereo on the 414mkII requires an "insert" cable to put 2 inputs into the 1 TRS stereo jack for each pair. To me that's not a huge deal, but you can get longer cable runs with less noise using XLR-balanced cables. To get 4 XLR mic connectors into the 414mkII will require 2 adapters, which is not a huge problem, or just use 1/4" connected Hi-Z mics. The 424mkII inputs will accommodate 4 Low-Z mics on XLR connectors, and the 414mkII will accept only 2. users would be great.Īny recommendations to which tapes to use for a punchy compression-type (saturation)? Or just experiment.? The mixer/EQ on both the 414/424 - are these known to give a warm quality sounding output? I know this is a vague question, but any thoughts from exp.
If so, this will be good as I can just replace my current (pooey) one and use this as my hardware EQ. Would I able to use the Tascam as a straight mixer in my audio chain? I mean without recording to tape. I don't care much for the functionality differences as they both have what I need in terms of that. I've read there isn't much difference between the two. I've had my eye on the 424 MKII for week or so, but since the 414 MKII seems to be a little more on the cheaper side I wanted some thoughts on the quality.Īre there any REAL quality differences? I'm after a WARM fat sound to my audio.
I've been looking around this forum (and elsewhere) but still can't get clear enough answers to my questions.