Tascam 788 Owner's Manual

Also see for PORTASTUDIO 788: Supplementary guide Addendum Tutorial Brief guide

Contents

Tascam 788 Owner's Manual Manual pdf 10 page image

1 – Introductory concepts–What do “16-bit” and “24-bit” mean?10 TASCAM 788 Digital PortaStudiotracks recorded in a session would look somethinglike:Actually, the arrangement of tracks on a disk is morecomplicated than this, but the diagram above givesyou an idea of how tracks don’t need to live side byside as they do on tape.Another thing to notice is that the tracks are of differ-ent lengths. Unlike a multitrack tape, where thelength of the track has to be equal to the length of thetape, a disk recorder can be “smart” enough to recog-nize when nothing is recorded, and use that space forother tracks, if necessary. This means that it’s diffi-cult to say that you can record a song of a certainlength on a disk of a given size (unlike a cassette, say,which is clearly labelled with the length of materialthat can be recorded on it).When recording or playing back material, the proces-sor (“brain”) of the 788 must collect all the trackstogether and play them simultaneously, so that youhear them playing together in perfect timing witheach other.This is what we meant when we talked earlier aboutthe number of tracks that can be replayed at one time.If we asked the 788 to play back hundreds of trackstogether, it would end up having to do too muchwork, and the tracks would be out of time with eachother.The “song”On the 788, as on many MIDI sequencers, etc., apiece of music is referred to as a song (whether or notit has a vocal part). Because on a multitrack tape sys-tem, a piece of music takes up a fixed length of alltracks of the tape—no more, no less, there is no needto pre-divide a tape into songs.On a disk-based system, however, before you startrecording a piece, you must “tell” the recorder thatyou are recording a new song.To the 788, a song is all the audio data you record,together with the playlist which allows you to selectparts of the song for playback, until you start work-ing on another song.You can copy songs to other songs (or to anotherdisk), erase them, protect them against furtherchanges, and so on.Since the song is a collection of digital data, there isno loss of quality when a song is stored or copied toanother disk.What do “16-bit” and “24-bit” mean?The 788 is capable of recording at 16-bit and 24-bitresolution. Basically speaking, in digital audio, themore bits, the better. This is because in a digitalaudio device like the 788, incoming sound is digi-tized, that is, converted into numbers, which in thecase of the 788 are stored on the disk.When it is time to replay the sound, the 788 reads thenumbers from hard disk and converts them back intosound.In each second, the 788 takes a “snapshot” of theincoming sound 44,100 times. By playing back thesesnapshots one after the other at the same speed(44.1 kHz, in technical terms), the 788 provides youwith an accurate reproduction of the sound, in muchthe same way as a movie camera takes a series of stillpictures (frames) 24 times a second, which arereplayed by the movie projector to give you the feel-ing of a continuously moving picture.However, the speed at which the sampling is carriedout is only half the story. The depth at which the sam-pling is carried out is also important.To illustrate this, let’s think of a black and white pho-tograph. In such a photograph, there can be an infi-nite number of grays, all the way from completewhite to total blackness.Track 3Track 6Track 5Track 4Track 1Track 7Track 2