punisher wrote on Tue, 06 February 2007 19:13 |
Matt_G wrote on Mon, 05 February 2007 02:26 | now that I have a real half inch ARIA equipped ATR-102.
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As opposed to a "fake one"?
While I have a lot of respect for Dave Hill, I never thought that much of the Aria electronics. Especially for the price of entry.
The standard ATR electronics rock!
And besides I think bouncing off tape isn't as effective as working off a 1/2" master to begin with.
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I did my homework on this one, I bought a standard ATR-102 off ebay which had the stock electronics but it was 1/4" so I had it shipped to ATR Services where I had it internally rebuilt with brand new standard response flux magnetics half inch heads (the repro head had to be a different impedance to run ARIA for playback). I'd heard about the ARIA electronics but I wasn't planning on buying them because I couldn't really justify the cost of having it as well as the stock electronics.
So I had Andy Krehm & Mike Wells do some tests for me as they both own ATR's that have both stock & ARIA electronics on the same machine. I sent them a few short mix samples & then got them to run them through both sets of electronics. Everytime I preferred the definition & punch of the ARIA samples as did some other mix engineer friends of mine. Andy & Mike had also said that they use the ARIA electronics over the stock 9 times out of 10 & that the clients also preferred the ARIA in most cases.
To justify the outlay I sacrificed the stock electronics, sure it would have been nice to have both but I couldn't justify the expense of having both & ATR services gave me a nice trade in on the old electronics & the quarter inch heads which helped. Having used it for a while now I don't regret my decision one bit. If I want an old school sound I just run 456 on my 1/4" Studer A807 @ 7.5 or 15ips. With the ATR/ARIA combo running GP9 the sound is big, wide, clean & punchy like modern tape should be. I also have the option of 15ips or 30ips for a slightly different sound. Looking forward to hearing the ATR tape formula soon.
I generally run the Cranesong D/A into the Sontec which is then patched into the ARIA. I don't agree that if it's not mixed to half inch then it's not as good as running it to half inch later. How do you quantify that opinion? If you intend to go analog at some point anyway why not use tape in the round trip to get that sound? Believe me it sounds a lot better then the tape knob on the HEDD. You can set your levels to drive the tape harder or softer depending on the sound you are after. Sometimes I even run my parallel compression into the tape as well. This works very well & the result is very satisfying both to me & my clients. But to each there own...
Matt