I don't exactly know a lot about recording (well, let's say I'm a total mongoloid), I have done some recordings to the computer (with an E-MU external sound card), but a while ago I bought a second hand Panasonic shoe box cassette player (model no. RQ-2104), so I wanted to try to record some stuff with it. First I recorded some sounds with a contact mic and that worked rather well. Then afterwards, with another tape player, I played this tape through some pedals and a bass amp and recorded it again with the Panasonic. I tried it both without a microphone and with a microphone. The result was that the part I re-recorded with the distortion pedal turned off still sounded quite ok (though obviously a bit mutilated), but when I had turned on the distortion pedal the sound was muffled, unclear and really silent, even though the bass amp was pretty loud and the cassette player and microphone were right in front of the amp.
Any ideas what happened? I'm not certain whether it's the tape player itself (which might have had its best time, since when I play tapes with it, it sounds much noisier than they really are) or the setting...