It is going to be used for therapy sessions at the university, where I study (music therapy). Hi-Fi is not, what is needed. Reason for the purchase is, that the 2 old cassette decks (with mic inputs and a slider for input level - they are that old!) are about to die. The "new" cassette deck will be a double deck taken from somewhere else in the university. I tested the deck - it is medium quality - nothing special, but it will do the job a couple of years more. I planned to go for a Behringer ub802 mixer and a DBX 266XL compressor. The over all main object is to get the recordings clear enough to hear both spoken words and loud drumming. As it is now soft talking (wich is not exactly unheard of in therapy situations) gets drowned in noise and/or louder drumming/piano playing gets heavily distorted.
I planed to set it up like this:
1) Get a hard drumming friend of mine to beat the drums.
2) Adjust the Behringer to just below clipping level.
3) Set the channel and main level on the behringer to 12 o'clock position (they are turning pots - not faders).
4) Take the main outs from the behringer and pluck it into the dbx.
5) Take the outputs from the dbx and send it to the tape deck.
6) Set tape deck input to 12 o'clock (I tested, that this matches -10dBV from my own tape deck).
7) With sound still going unprocessed thru the dbx, I adjust the output gain, so that the peaks will just reach +7dB on the tape deck meter.
I set the threshold to 10dB below the point, where it starts to kick in.9) I set the ratio to 4:1.
10) I turn up the output from the dbx till the tape deck peaks at +7dB again (the meter goes to
.Ok, I am sorry, that this got so long, what I realy wanted to know was - is it ok to send a signal from a +4dBu device to a -10dBV device, if I turn down the output of the +4dBu device enough? Or are there other hidden problems? I have checked the impedances, and there is sertainly no problem in that respect. The music therapy study is one of the most expensive human studies in Denmark (the technical studies are far more expensive) - still we are on a very tight budget. To give examples we have 15 lessons of psycology per ½ year for 1½ years - and the same amount of psyciatry. We have 3 hours of private singing lessons durring the entire first year. A lesson is 45minutes. We have more subjects than this, but this gives a pretty good picture of, why I do not want to spend money from the university, and then find out that I made a mistake. I got a student job (15 hours each ½ year) to take care of the instruments and all, that is related to this (15 hours run quick - I spend more time and earn about 85€ after tax/½year, so I realy do it more or less as a favour).
Ok - this got long too ... The answer will ironically probably be pretty short
