Dual cassette decks used to be king. You'd copy your records (vinyls) to cassette so you could play it in your Walkman (huh, just realised how lame I am; I get annoyed at people saying iPod and here I am saying "Walkman"), or off the radio if you we're feeling cheap/naughty, and with the second deck you could make your own mixtapes from even other tapes. Did the Recording Companies care? Not too much as they knew you couldn't do a perfect copy; with each generation the quality degraded so one copy is just that. When DAT came onto the scene, oh my gosh, did they change their mind. Perfect copies became easy, so, to cut a long story short, huge restrictions were made on later consumer devices, and second generation digital recordings were firmware blocked.
But this was back in the 80s-90s and not currently the topic. Now recording audio is just not the thing. People simply don't want to; mixtapes? Playlists kinda do that. Copying vinyl? Most that I have bought recently have a link for a digital download. So yeah. Most people simply don't care. But I do. As I said before, I recently acquired an audio recorder rack system. So first off, how is it? Well it's as described so I've got no complaints. That aside it's analogue in only. It's kinda designed for schools/churches/halls. You have two systems in one rack, with an output that picks one or both. (Not a perfect system; the deselected system does bleed through a bit.) I get the impression that you are supposed to be able to record live recordings or speech for playback later. Think weddings, that kinda stuff. Records to USB or a SD card. There is no direct record in from one system to another, but you can just run the output to the input from the XLR connectors at the back. So it's simple really. And it's the best I could find.
So why are they so rare? I blame the recording studios. A copyright infringeable device has in the past triggered a reaction so it's just not worth it for the limited market. This device skips digital in so perfect 1st generation copies are impossible, but you can then do infinite 2nd generation ones.... It's a shame really as I was looking forward to playing around with bitrate conversions and how it all works in a device like this. However, now I've got something set up and usable, it's really tempting to buy a portable recorder that will give me this ability and then I can use it without too much bother is perfection is needed/wanted....
So how did I set this up anyway? Well in the 80s all amplifiers had a "record out" and many had a "monitor in". Some had two for tape<->tape. But there don't exist today, and I don't have a reliable old amplifier to use. So how did I solve it? My current amp has three "zones". Main, Zone 2 which has a second HDMI output and Zone 3 which is designed to be used in a separate room with a separate audio only output. Settable to some of the inputs and also to just output what is selected on main.
Too easy.
The 80s has returned! But loads more to do and more to rant about later....
