DA-88's are going down!
The failure of surface mounted electrolytic capacitors looks set to bring the life of the TASCAM DA-88 and its decendants to an end. More...
New website for the original STUDIO CONNECTIONS, as conceived by Colin Abrahams. This site is still under construction and in its final testing phase. During this trial period, there will be stuff on both this site and the old STUDIO CONNECTIONS website. See the old site for:
The failure of surface mounted electrolytic capacitors looks set to bring the life of the TASCAM DA-88 and its decendants to an end. More...
The MCI JH-400B console from Sun Studios, which once accounted for a major slice of the music recorded in Sydney for the advertising industry, lives on!
Just completed a major restoration job on this console, which has changed homes several times since Sun and is now the centrepiece of Molten Rock Studios.
Most of the modules are still in surprisingly good condition, with an apparently low failure rate of the proprietory MCI 2001 I.C.'s.
Unfortunately, there were also extensive problems and damage due to incompetant workmanship which had to be rectified. The automation system was severely blown up. In addition to having to replace a large number of obviously blown chips (most of them having to be obtained overseas), there were several really nasty faults which took a long time to sort out. On top of that, it was necessary to "unmodify" all 24 VCA Fader modules. Finally, we have a clean, stable desk!
The MCI JH-400B was the last in the line of MCI's famous 400 series consoles, which was the first to introduce the "inline" configuration to recording consoles around the mid 70's. The JH-400B was released shortly after the JH-500 and is basically a JH-400 retrofitted with the ARMS automation system. These consoles were only manufactured for a while, before being replaced by the 600 series consoles.
The 400's are 28 channel quad desks, with 4 sends and 24 busses. All stages are transistor buffered 2001 I.C.s which run off ±24V rails, allowing ample headroom throughout. The overall signal path is very simple, with a minimal number of audio stages. All audio routing is done with relays and switches. However, relays from this era have proven to be less reliable than FET switching.
Line inputs and outputs are transformer balanced. The 3 band EQ is fixed Q but uses precision switching instead of potentiometers. The mic preamps incorporate Jensen transformers and are very similar in design to the API, Quad-Eight and Auditronics consoles. However, only the Quad-Eight and JH-400 consoles run off a higher voltage, which directly translates to more output headroom. Furthermore, the nominal mic preamp output level at the patch bay is -6dBm, increasing the preamp headroom by a further 10dB. Ideally, a compressor/limiter is inserted at this point and this results in a superior peak handling ability for microphone signals to what could be achieved with many modern low cost consoles.
Although many engineers were impressed by the sonic performance of the 400 series, they fell out of favour by the mid 80's due to their limited number of channels, sends and signal routing versatility which failed to satisfy the demands of the racks of outboard gear and synth modules of the day. Ironically, they are now ideal for a modern small to medium size digital studio, if nothing else as a high quality analogue front end and monitoring system.
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