what could be the cause for…

[Tom Meegan]

The channel condition lights are either green, yellow or red. It is a visually measure of the error rate on the record stream.

There is error correction built into the deck, so a low error rate is unlikely to show up on playback. When the condition is red, it is time to have the machine that did the record looked at by a maintenance engineer.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Just thought of something

[Debe]

Also, dirty heads have caused it for me in the past.

If you’ve never manually cleaned heads, then you might want to try a head cleaning tape instead, although several engineers back in my facility days would cringe and try to have me flogged for suggesting it. However, just once to see if it’s dirty heads as opposed to bad heads probably won’t wear on the heads a tremendous amount. Every day, yeah, not a good idea. Once….well, it’s your call.

If it’s not dirty heads, and you end up having it serviced, you might want to have them teach you how to manually clean heads while they have the thing open anyways. This is not a bad skill to have if you don’t already know how to do it!

I used to do it every morning on 7 machines back in my assisting days. It’s not terribly difficult once you know what you’re doing, and it doesn’t take that long, either.

debe

[Sebastian Riezler]

thanks for your answers guys.
the reasons for channel condition red you mentioned are the same that came to my mind when i thought about this ‘black hawk down’ as we call it for fun. i just thought, there is a more technical explanation for the hole thing, because, to be honest, i have to explain these problems to some people wich have no expereince in technical things and i just want to blow them away with technical terms 🙂

so i will have to clean the heads more often from now on. but, debe, don’t you think it’s a bit often to clean the heads every day?

anyway
thanks
Riot

[Charley King]

If your machines have a lot of tape go throuogh them, it is not uncommon to clean them every day, and in some cases if you have multiple shifts, it is not uncommon to ahve them cleaned at the beginning of each shift.
If you don’t have a lot of tape shuttle, such as in linear editing, or a lot of tape from different sources, then you might try cutting back to every other day, or even once a week, but every day is always best.

Charlie

[Sebastian Riezler]

your answers are one more proof why the creativecow forums are the best!
ok so from now on we will clean our machine’s heads every day or at least once a week.
thanks guys!!
greetz Riot