The upside of a studio melt down

[Kyle]

I thought I?d share a very cool experience that I had recently and see if any of you have been in this same position.

I had a client in who wanted to hear some old tapes that he had recorded back in the day and dump any keeper tunes into pro-tools. As we were working on the session my Fostex E-16 crapped out on me. I was a little embarrassed.

It turns out that this guy had owned and rebuilt all of the Fostex tape decks at one time or another and offered to fix it for me in trade for our session. I asked him if I could watch over his shoulder to better understand my gear and we got started. The machine has always had a few little personality quirks and he thought he could fix those too. Once we took the machine apart we could see that it had taken a pretty bad fall at one time. We had machine shops straighten bent parts, reset the tape tension, and realigned the heads. I got to see first hand how improper maintenance will result in poor audio quality and mechanical malfunction. We spent about two weeks rebuilding this machine. It sounds fantastic! In fact, it is sounding better now that it ever has.

I?m very stoked that the machine is fixed, but I?m way more excited about the free education that I just received. What started out as a shitty situation turned out to be a great experience. I learned a hell-of-a-lot and made a resourceful friend in the process.

Has anyone else had a technical disaster turn into a positive experience?

[r0ck1r0ck2]

Has anyone else had a technical disaster turn into a positive experience?

i guess that would be most of my life.....
still tho' great story....

[drumsound]

That is a cool story. I've had things like guitar amps frying on a session but then the 'replacement' amp sounding better and things like that. Nothing as cool as you situation.