The Bottle Garden

Along with the Otari MX 70, this is one of our main multitrack machines. We modified the amplifier cards to allow correct biasing for high-output tape.

Our favourite feature: LED readout on the vari-speed.

This is a really handy machine to have around a studio.

Some features:

• Ajustable record bias
• Balanced inputs and outputs
• Third head for record monitoring (or tape delay)
• Vari-speed
• Dolby B and C
• A built-in oscillator
• LED readout with programmable cue points

This is our second string mixdown deck. While it doesn’t sound quite as good as the Studer B67, it’s been a sass-free workhorse. We bought it off our friends in the band Reversing Falls.

It has a few handy features, including:

• Built in oscillator for speedier alignments
• External NAB/CCIR EQ Switches
• 3-way Fluxivity level switch

If you have this machine and you’re missing the manual, you can download it here.

This was our very first open reel tape machine. We recorded a few albums on it and it sounded fine and never gave us any trouble. Lately we’ve been more apt to use it for tape loops and echo but we don’t love it any less.

Now that we have both this machine and an Otari 1″ 8-track, I must sadly report that Tascam’s ad copy is mendacious

This is our main mixdown deck. For the first two years we owned this machine, it had an annoying habit of falling out of record mode. Because of this, we relegated it to tape echo, rewinding and other secondary duties. We replaced every single electrolytic capacitor in the machine chasing down the prob, but it ended up being just a little jumper that wasn’t pushed in properly. Boy, do we ever feel stupid.

Now it’s just a sweet sounding late-70s Swiss mastering deck that gives us no sass and just happens to match our console.