Analogue and Digital recorders and mixers
The Otari MX5050
I am fortunate enough to own both a Zoom H6 and an Otari reel to reel. When one looks at the technical advances in the recording industry be it for the home studio or a multi-million Dollar setup there is just no comparison between that of yesterday’s analogue recorders and today’s digital recorders. Maybe I am wrong, read on.
Professional R2R machine – Otari MX5050 B2
The Digital
The H6 is virtually a home studio in the palm of your hand. Highly affordable, quick to set up with a remarkable recording ability. Extremely quiet microphone preamplifiers, on par with my Focusrite Scarlett.
Bringing in the analogue
Whilst the Otari comes in various models, some even being 8 track it is still one of the favourites amongst the home collector, along with Ampex, Pioneer, Teac, Technics, Akai, Revox and Studer. And no, this list is or should be infinite because we all have our favourites.
A well maintained machine, which includes new or lapped heads is a crowd puller. The question that arises is it because most of the crowd were born post 1990 or is it the quality? I know of umpteen people that have never heard or even seen a reel 2 reel recorder. Is it truly vintage and what determines whether something is vintage or not? In a race against time, setting up the H6 is a breeze and the quality of reproduction will always surpass the Otari, even the highly ranked Studer or Ampex. That’s my opinion though. However, try over-saturating or modulating the H6 we end up with one hellava mess. The reel deck is going to beat it hands down.
This is called record slam – pushing into saturation. We have all heard of the wonderful advantages of tube over solid state when it comes to distortion right? Well it just so happens that some musicians like to slam their recording. You just don’t get the same result with digital.
So is record slamming the only advantage of R2R?
Zoom H6 -your portable home studio
It’s not all negative—reel recorders have their place. We’ll discuss the real Otari and why people buy open reel recorders later.
I bought the H6 years ago from Sound Select, a professional audio store in South Africa, probably right after its release. I tried to find a video of a band in a US pub using the H6 but couldn’t locate it. That’s one reason I love this recorder.
A few years back I used the H6 at a live performance of The Parlotones at the Paul Clüver Forest Amphitheatre in Elgin a few years back and the quality of the recording was beyond incredible. Unfortunately due to copyrighting of their music I can release the file here suffice to say it was extremely good. Bear in mind as well that we were sitting approximately 40 meters away from the stage, slightly to the left. (towards the end of the concert focus was on the right part of the stage which unfortunately was not loud enough to get a clear reproduction of the original, but I still rate the recorder a good 10/10).
Lastly, if you have not watched the ultimate movie on analogue audio, do watch Sound City, a documentary on the fabled recording studio that was located in Van Nuys, California.
The Neve 8028 – what Sound City is all about.