Deliberately Clipping or Recording Hot into Cassette Recorder

Hey guys, so i just bought a Yamaha MT50 4 track cassette recorder because i want to mess around with distortion and lo fi sounds. I like recording into it very hot, into the red, but is this bad for the unit in the long run? If it is constantly overdriving, will it eventually break?

if you can get a tape recorder to clip, then you've come round the bend cause theres the idm man.

lol

  On 11/23/2014 at 5:23 AM, skibby said:

if you can get a tape recorder to clip, then you've come round the bend cause theres the idm man.

Im sorry, i honestly have no idea how this technology works. So is clipping only really a digital thing?

  On 11/23/2014 at 7:04 PM, Danny O Flannagin said:

 

  On 11/23/2014 at 5:23 AM, skibby said:

if you can get a tape recorder to clip, then you've come round the bend cause theres the idm man.

Im sorry, i honestly have no idea how this technology works. So is clipping only really a digital thing?

 

as far as i know yes, but when you rule out the obvious, no matter how likely, the opposite must be the truth.

You're not gonna break it. Clipping tape is a time-honored tradition. Baph may have some advice for you; I believe he's watmm's cassette guru.

it's not. analogue signals can clip as well, e.g. overdriving an amp.

however, tape saturation, afaik, is not the product of overdriving per se but rather a result of the ferrite on the tape being saturated, i.e. it can't be magnetized any more. so that alone won't damage the deck.

but can you damage whatever insides a tape deck has by constantly overdriving it?

my guess would be: hardly, since very little voltage surplus will prob be needed for anything musically useful. but i honestly know next to nothing about this stuff, so...

analog stuff can clip too, but i dont think people use the term clipping with tape very often. because it usually 'saturates' with softer edges, aka 'soft clipping'. itd all depend on the tape/deck. in some cases, the deck itself (its input and amps) might clip before your signal hits the tape, which would mean that with that deck you can't actually 'saturate' the tape, and your distortion is coming from the deck itself (and you could get that distortion without any tape, just by running through the deck), and that would be of the hard clipping variety (and probably not sound too good). the tape itself distorting is where its at, so hopefully your deck can pass a signal hot enough to the tape to do it.

there shouldnt be any risk from recording with a loud signal..

Thanks for the help. Im really just concerned about the internal preamps on each of the channels constantly overdriving and loosing channels because of that

  On 11/24/2014 at 2:07 AM, ieafs said:

as far as i know you can't damage the record function itself, but the preamps could die if you really BLAST them constantly.

 

but overdriving the pre-amps is obviously different then saturating to tape. you could have the trim of a mixer distorting and then have that signal being put down at a normal level to tape. so if you're ust interested in the TAPE saturation you don't need to have the pre-amps really overdriven, you can just send that signal hot to the tape via the mixer routing.

Oh i see, like setting a high gain but moving the fader low to a volume where it isn't blowing my brains out