Cassette transcriber into pitch shifter?

[seilee1]

There's a Panasonic RR-830 cassette transcriber at a thrift store here and I wanted to see if anyone might have any guesses as to whether it'd be possible to run a live signal into the circuit somewhere and use its pitch shifter in realtime.

I don't know much else about the electronics in there except that the pitch shifting mechanism seems to be designed for monophonic textures (i.e. not music). The manual is at http://service.us.panasonic.com/OPERMANPDF/RR830.PDF.

Would make sense to try cooking up something that would allow a mic level signal to impedance match the circuit early in the audio path (near the tape head)?

[seilee1]

Any thoughts about this? I'd really appreciate any input/ideas/etc, even if it's not at all a definitive answer.

[Pano]

I looked at you post when it first went up, but just don't know for sure...

I used to know what tape head levels were, but that was along time ago. Similar to mic and MM phono, IIRC.

There may be NAB equalization, I suspect you'd want to bypass that.

Shouldn't hurt to wire the mic in in place of the tape head. Just be sure you don't switch into record! The HF bias may not be good for the mic. If you have an electret mic, it will need power as well as DC blocking.

You might be able to figure out the signal path, the pitch control is likely at normal line level. If so, you can use some other mic preamp, just come out of that into the pitch control.

Hopefully someone else here will have better ideas!

[seilee1]

Thanks for the help, panomaniac. I wasn't too concerned with preserving signal quality or equalization, so I just went ahead and put an old cheapo dynamic mic (one of those ones that has an attached 1/4" cable) into where the tape head was. It had some distortion at highish input levels, but worked pretty nicely for the most part. I put an electric guitar into it too, and turning the volume up on the player gave some really nice dirty distortion.

A couple more quick questions for anyone who might know--Would putting a line level signal into this be risky? Also, the audio output is listed as 8 ohms; would it be alright to put this into a bass amp? I've gotta brush up on impedances a bit, I think.

[Pano]

Glad you got it going!

I don't think you want to hit the head preamp with line level. It will overdrive it for sure. More than you want.

You can use the output to drive your bass amp. As long as the impedance of the next thing in line is 8 ohms or more, you'll have no trouble. Start with the volume low, then bring it up slowly to the point you like. If you bass amp has a line level input, that's what you want to use.