Re: FS: Tascam Porta One 4 track $20...

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@zvonar.com>]

At 2:21 PM -0700 7/9/04, Legion wrote:
>I found my old 4track last week in a box...the unit is cool as hell 
>in features.

I have one of these, and I agree that it's pretty nifty for a cheap 
old 4-track cassette deck. I bought one back in 1985, intending to 
use it as it was designed to be used - as a 4-track recorder with 
sync overdub capability. I soon found that it was even more fun as 
part of a playback system for soundscapes.

The principal advantage of the Porta One is that it operates at the 
same speed as a normal cassette deck (higher-end Portastudios ran at 
double speed). That obviously means that it can be used to play back 
tapes recorded on other decks, and because it is a 4-track this also 
means you can play back both the Side A and the Side B tracks. Side B 
will be backwards!

My typical setup was to use the Porta One in combination with one or 
two regular cassette decks and one or two CD players, and in later 
years in combination with a couple of Eventides and a Mackie 1604. I 
set the system up so that I could feed any of the sound sources into 
the Eventides without the direct signal going into the mix, thereby 
having a wide range of "recognizability" due to having straight 
playback, backwards playback, and playback with heavy processing. My 
source material consisted of anything I had accumulated during my 
cassette years: punk/new wave, world music, classical, 20th century 
avant garde, spoken word, etc. I also had a few 4-track loop 
cassettes of spoken word and sound effects.

The only potential downside is that the Porta One uses dbx noise 
reduction, whereas most regular cassette decks use Dolby. I'd just 
turn the noise reduction off, figuring that amid the sonic mayhem it 
wouldn't make any difference.
-- 

______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com