Chris Pickett wrote:

Mike Rivers wrote:

In that case, your choice of a small format recorder will be fine. But
understand that while your music may be cool, and appreciated by 10+
people, you won't turn out recordings that sound the same as
commercial CDs. This may not be a concern to you (your listeners won't
complain) but it's a common concern of just about everyone who uses
"professional quality" and "in my home" in the same message.

I do actually want more than just 10 people to like it. I think what I
meant more was, the number one priority is myself liking it.

If you mean CD's with the mastering job typical of top 40 radio songs
these days, I certainly don't want that. But I appreciate that it will
be hard to get studio-quality sound at home. I would prefer not to make
CD's at all, but rather focus on high-grade vinyl -- there's certainly
enough of a market to move 1000 copies of a good EP in North America.
Basically, I would be happy to produce something that I can send to the
mastering house / pressing plant without them totally screwing up or
being unable to work with the recording and get some nice records back.

Anyway, as I said elsewhere, I'm now thinking about 1" 8-tracks (as
opposed to 1" 16-tracks, which still aren't full-width).


Getting studio quality is very much a matter of attention to what counts
(and knowing what doesn't count). Given the right circumstances you can
produce something good enough to sell 1000 copies on a narrow format
machine - there have been plenty of releases recorded on my 1/4" 8 track
and 1/2" 16 track. However, my 2" 16 track has a certain solid sound to
it which the engineer in me loves but I'm still not sure whether the end
result is actually much better than the results I get from the narrow
formats. Or maybe I'm just not pushing the large format hard enough.

Cheers.

James.