An Old Dog Learning New Tricks

Do you remember Playback, "The Electronic Playground?" If you are under 45 years of age, probably not. Playback was a chain of retail stores in the 1970’s popular for carrying mainstream audio electronics. The entire store was dedicated to a single format: Audio. No computers, no TVs, no video - they were about home stereo and little else.

For the era, the equipment they carried was considered very good stuff. Brands like Pioneer, Sansui, Tandberg, Teac, Yamaha, Akai, JBL, Advent, KLH and Infinity ruled the waves; $1,000 price points were basically unheard of. I still have a Pioneer CT-F9191 cassette deck purchased in 1977 from the Playback in Peoria, Illinois. It remains a beautiful piece to gaze upon with its wooden chassis, large white meters and brushed aluminum face plate. I still dust it sometimes. But in 1979 I wanted more sophistication, better sound and longer playing times, so I purchased a new Teac, reel-to-reel tape deck from EDI in Peoria, then owned by Dick Green. It cost $400, and I was in heaven. It was my most prized component, the thing friends commented on first upon seeing my system, the piece I was most proud of. The purchases were made with one thing in mind, however; recording LPs to tape.

In searching the internet for the equipment needed to fit my self imposed requirements, it became immediately obvious that digital recorders with internal hard drives were not in abundance, and when found, rather expensive. Tascam (Teac) has a nice unit with digital recorder and a hard drive, but it retails for just under $2,000. I’ll spend that kind of money on a new set of loudspeakers or a new preamp because I understand those things. This purchase is on something new and sticking my toe in slowly means not spending more than I can afford to lose if I end up hating it and selling it at a loss.

I did a serious search of my options and ended up settling on the Alesis MasterLink 9600. It retails for $799 on a number of different retail web sites. For reasons that I’m not entirely sure of, I purchased the Alesis from American Musical Supply. By that I mean, of the three or four sites that had the Alesis for $799, there was nothing extra alluring about the AMS site. My decision to purchase from them wasn’t based upon any objective rationale, except that I happened to be at that site when I made up my mind to purchase the unit. I’m glad that I did.

Recording with digital media today is a lot different from the old days when analog to analog was the norm. With the old Teac reel-to-reel, recording was basically intuitive and learned in a few moments: A meter check of the track to be recorded would be made to check out maximum levels. The record level would be turned all the way down until the needle was in the groove and just before the song started one would start moving the level up. Same at the end of the recording. Voila, manual fade-in and fade-out. Average record levels would be set on the hot (high) side because analog was very forgiving of overloading (while digital most definitely is not). Recording in digital is as different from analog as pits and lands are from a continuously flowing sine wave .

With the Alesis, an unusually flexible machine, fade in and fade out are obviously not done by hand but are designated in seconds at the front and back of the track (with different shaped slopes no less). Tracks on a playlist can be moved around and put in any order desired. Try that with analog! Say you continuously record a long set or just one side of an LP. With digital, breaks can be easily inserted, plus volume can be adjusted for each song individually without dubbing. And when done with a set of songs, they can be deleted from the hard drive thereby freeing up space for more music. My only real complaint with the 9600 has to do with the amount of memory in the hard drive. With 40 gb, recording time at 16/44.1 is limited to around 50 hours. Going up to 24/88.2 reduces that time to approximately 17 hours. Ten times that capacity would be nice, but then again the retail price of the unit would probably expand accordingly. Still, the larger the hard drive the more attractive the 9600 would be in terms of performance.

The Alesis also has a feature called CD24. What this does is allow one to record and playback at 24/96, a true high resolution architecture. With CD24 the Alesis has combined two non-proprietary standards: ISO-9660 CD-ROM disc format with AIFF sound files. Which means that this data can be read by Windows, Macintosh and Unix computers, but not by your standard 24/96 consumer audio DAC - a bummer. I would like to work in standard 24/88.2 because I have outboard DACs that can work at that level - it would be a nice upgrade and a properly equipped computer wouldn’t be needed. Still, that machine wouldn’t be able to download music off of the internet. I’ll work on that one later.

So, how does it sound and work? I’m learning. But my curve is on the ascent and the results I’m obtaining are improving with each successive effort. This, however, I already know… I haven’t had this much fun with the Big Rig in years. More next month.

2. I have also heard, and believe, that the electrical environment within a computer may not be the best for audio storage and retrieval. Computers are constantly running programs and busy with things other than the music. Computers are fast, and with speed comes noise. Plus, how many things can you do at the same time and still do them all correctly? Personally, I seldom can do one, much less more than that.

3. Do you like product support? I know I do. The Alesis manual is almost 50 pages long… and it could be longer to describe all that this machine does. I was trying something new recently when I got to the end of my knowledge and skill, and needed someone to answer a tech question that I couldn’t resolve with the manual. I sent Alesis an e-mail with my question. To my surprise, within 20 minutes I got a response from a real person. The answer was on point and helped me accomplish the task at hand.

I’ve written about High Definition Tape Transfers (HDTT.. Google it.) in the past. Their CD transfers result in some of the finest digital recordings ever made by anyone. Trust me. With the movement toward downloading high resolution music, I’ve got a place for you to go. It’s the Hi Rez Download Center at HDTT. You can download from their 24/96 .wav files that can be played back on a computer system, or burned to DVD and then played back from their. I don’t even know what a .wav file is, but I hear they can be useful in making some superb recordings. HDTT has a nice selection of classical 24/96 selections, and though I haven’t heard the Stravinsky L’HISTOIRE du SOLDAT in high resolution, I’ve had the 16/44.1 version from HDTT and it is absolutely state-of-the-art even as a lowly ol’ cee-dee. You haven’t heard your Big Rig until you’ve heard it with the Stravinsky.

Our cable and broadband has been furnished by Insight Digital for a number of years. That has changed recently, and with the change the purchaser of Insight’s consumer base (Comcast) has changed our e-mail address. The new e-mail address is bfshifi@comcast.net.