I just watched the video at [Link: remotecentral.com], about laserdisc players, video quality and such.

FWIW, I know a guy who has a Sony 854-4 tape recorder, recently brought up to spec. That's the model we used to use to do live recordings at the Whisky A Go Go and the Troubadour (though we did B B King at Chino State Prison, too), all for broadcast after being mixed down from our original four channel recordings). This was from early in 1971 to 1974.

One of us had been a DJ (and owned a hi fi store) and convinced the program director at a local rock and roll AM station that playing live recordings or people in town would be cool. We geared up, having bought product at wholesale, and recorded about twice a month.

The first group we did was Seals & Crofts; we a recorded a pretty shy Carly Simon soon after, and went on to record maybe fifty bands. We even did B B King at Chino State Prison. This all was mixed down from our discrete four channel tapes to mono for AM and stereo for FM. We did John McLaughlin at the Whisky in LA's first Sansui QS Quad-encoded live broadcast.... Nitty Gritty Dirt Band... Hell, Jo Jo Gunn, BTO, America....

The bummer was that once the Musicians' Union heard about this, they sent out a fifty-year old guy in a suit to watch over us each time. He was to be sure we didn't make copies for ourselves. It was all destroyed after fulfilling the contractual obligation to play it on the air.

The best one had to be the Gospel Music Workshop of America's Mass Choir in a huge Methodist church in downtown LA. Three days of recording!

I run sound at a small community center here on the west coast. We take 8 feeds from our stage snake and run it into an amplified buffered splitter, and from there into a device that converts the signal to a usb signal. USB goes into a tower, and using software, we can and have done recordings of a number of acts.

Biggest name we've done is a band that backed up one of the four blues kings, Earl. The Butanes had drums, guitar, bass, and a portable organ plugged into a leslie horn, which we put two sm57's on.

Cool part is we can easily come in after and do all sorts of adjustments as needed, and provide great sounding results. We do a radio show as well, except it's only on our web site. www.widespotperformingarts.org , look for the Goin' Coastal link. Yes, we pay ascap and bmi and sesac.

The only live recordings I did were a band demo with my TEAC 3300 and another band, using the store's brand new Sony PCM-F1 digital processor that recorded to their SL-2000 portable Beta unit. Two Audio Technica AT-811 mics, straight into the processor. The acoustics of the club sucked but when I listened to my cassette copy, the background noise level was incredibly low and it still captured the ambience of the room exceptionally well. Someone at the store put the original Beta tape in the box of tapes that were returned for credit and I was seriously PO'd, but at least I got a fee copies. This was '82, BTW.

I do sound engineering on the side. I specialize in acoustic music and I have a lot of great recordings from live performances that I have mixed. I run an X32 console which gives me 32 tracks straight to my MacBook for later mix down. It produces fantastic results.



Speaking of noise floor, the X32's noise floor is incredibly low. I can take and boost a weak signal by 40+dB with no hint of noise at all.