The lure of more tracks has driven me to diversion.  In December of ’05 I purchased a Otari MX-70 1” 16 track.  A wonderful piece of technology from the 1980’s, or so I thought….

When the machine was purchased I guess I wasn’t through enough in testing / evaluation of the deck.  The heads looked marvelous (still do), the physical appearance was 9/10, the transport worked as advertised and playback sounded great.  I was excited.  My studio partner drove the 6 hours to ville de Quebec and picked it up.  Fuck yeah!

Read through the thick manual.  Learned that the I/O was wired up ass backwards to most other machines.  Bought the XLR to ¼” cables and had my friend Tom wire the cables up. 

Everything was going well, except for a side trip into sticky tape shredding syndrome that required me to use ‘deflux’ cleaner to get the heads cleaned up.  I was excited.

Put the MRL tape in the deck and played it back….  Wow even test tones sounded wonderful.  Made some changes to the I/O configuration, -8 from +4 and balanced to unbalanced.  Had the machine calibrated.  Was very excited……..

Made my first test recording….. what the hell is that wind sound on half the tracks?????

Then I found out something about the MX-70……  the first generation of the machines suffer from a certain condition…. lets call it the ‘Wind Syndrome’.

To summarize:  certain components in the amplifier cards of the MX-70 deteriorate over time and cause a ‘windy’ sound on recorded tracks.  Fuck.

I did find a solution… an expensive solution.  More on this later.

Oh yeah I haven’t even told you about the problems I had with the board I bought to go with the MX-70….. another day…..

Anyways, in hindsight, I wish I had had a chance to make a test recording before I bought the MX-70…..  at least I know now for when the time comes to buy a 2” 24 track (I hope my wife isn’t reading this last part ha ha….)