On the other hand, the thorough manual that accompanies the device makes no bones about the intended user - you or I are sitting in the bedroom with a drum machine, a microphone or two, some Guinean xylophones, and a guitar-cum-keyboard. Tascam appear to have slightly schizoid intentions as far as the 234 is concerned.įirstly, they make it seem rather 'professional': there's the 19in rackmounting capability that suggests STUDIO in big letters there's the price of £575 (compared to £690 for a mixer-included-all-ready-to-go 244 Portastudio) and there's the general feeling that this is a specialised product (audio-visual use springs to mind). Reckon you can fit a side of the concept album on that? Course you can. But through its paces it certainly went, make no mistake.Īnd so we are faced with what at first glance might pass for a rack-mountable up-market cassette deck - except, of course, that it's 4-track, recording those four parallel pieces of information across the full width of the high-bias tape, meaning one travel in one direction, per cassette.ĭouble-speed, too, which means that a C90 cassette will end up giving you just 22½ minutes of space - and C120 cassettes are definitely not recommended. Thanks to the chaps at Tascam's UK distributors being all het up over some motor show or the other, we didn't get the lengthiest of work-outs with the 234. In fact they've souped it up and turned it around somewhat, making it worthy of a One Two Once-Over. Not to be out-done (and, I'm sure they would suggest, completely at the behest of their own supercharged R&D department), Tascam - often called Teac, which is in fact the parent company - have split up their own invention, the Portastudio, and now offer the 4-track cassette deck only: the Tascam 234. Which is to say that it consists of constituent parts, linking up to make a full, up-and-running 4-track cassette recording set-up: recorder to put the music on to tape mixer to guide the music to the recorder in an acceptable and pleasing fashion (and back again for the mix) and an interconnecting board to send all the stuff around and about the system with accuracy. Sharp-eyed and clever readers will have noticed that the Yamaha 4-track cassette system, reviewed last month in One Two, does the extremely fashionable thing among gadgetry both big and small of existing in a modular form.

Tascam 234 handbuch