Otari MX5050 MKIII Question

[King Arthur]

This may be a long shot, but does anyone know if you can play back and record onto the same track at once?

I've recorded onto two tracks, which I have combined in a group and want to record the output onto one of the tracks I am playing back from, overwriting it (while playing it) with the combination of itself and another track.

The repo head is before the record head right so hypothetically you could do this eh?

I'd send them both to another track but they are all used up. The pitfalls of 8...

[High and Outside]

No, the first head is the erase head, the second head is the record head and the third is the repro head...in the order that the tape sees them while it's moving.

So you can't do what you were hoping to do...as soon as you hit "record" the erase head starts to erase your material.

[docb]

Long ago Akai/Roberts made 2 track machines that could do what you are thinking of - sort of. They called it "sound on sound". I think that the erase head was simply disabled in that mode and thus you could record on top of a recorded track. In theory with enough fooling around one could possibly selsync playback (only way things will stay in sync, you can't bounce from a separate playback head) track one and record it over material on track two, thus creating a 1+2 mixed to mono track 2, so you could record new stuff on track one. Obviously it did not work well enough that everyone else started offering it on their decks.