So, before leaving for work I grabbed my two contact mics.  It’s been awhile since I’ve done a contact mic post.
 
I knew before coming into the office that for my creative endeavor I wanted to record the sound of all of the decks that we have in the machine room.  The machine room is the hub of the entire office.  All of the editing systems are routed to a patch bay in the machine room which allows us to output to various stocks of tape.
 
I have been in the post-production business for a long time and nowadays I have less reason to be in the machine room because I’m usually editing and somebody else takes care of my outputs.  Although, back in the day I used to be well versed in the machine room and it’s many intricacies.  I have always loved these high-end decks.  Each one has it’s own quirks.  Each one also has it’s own sound.  So I took out my contact mics and recorded each deck one by one down the line.  Then, as an extra, I recorded the avid drives in various mic positions.
 
Now the fun part!  Below you’ll see three consecutive music players.  Each one has identical playlists.  Start by playing one then add another on top of it.  Try mixing different machines together.  Try it with some headphones because the recordings have a pretty hard-panned stereo quality.
 
I was surprised at how pretty the hard drive recordings sounded.  The mic position really changed the timbre of the sound a lot.  Finally, my favorite deck had to be the HD-1400 DVCPROHD deck.  I was shocked at how much hum it had and if you listen to it carefully you can hear the beating of two sine waves never quite tuning up.
 
Have fun experimenting! Oh, and don’t forget that each of the music players has their own volume control.
 
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