Vintage Digital

Audio Recorders

In the world of two track analogue mastering audio recorders, the Ampex ATR-100 Series recorders are regarded as the finest reel to reel audio mastering recorders ever made. The fact that they are still in use today, more than forty years later is surely testament to that.
The year was 1982, Tascam introduced the Tascam 244 Portastudio, and in doing so they managed to change the recording world forever, particularly for home musicians! This was a game changing moment for recording studios.
The Tascam 234 Syncaset 4-channel cassette deck was a groundbreaking audio recorder based on the Portastudio transport, that was introduced in 1983. It failed to achieve the wide acceptance of the all mighty Portastudio however.
The Studer A721 is a professional cassette recorder with superb audio performance, reliability, and convenient operating concept, including a four-motor tape transport mechanism and modular audio electronics with automatic record parameter calibration.
The Sony DTC-1000ES Digital Audio Tape Deck was the world’s first DAT machine, and although it was a consumer machine, it proved to be very successful in the professional world too, perhaps even more so as DAT never really made it in the consumer world.
The Sony PCM2500 DAT Recorder took over from the Sony PCM-1630 Series Recorders, and kept the DAT format alive for years to come in the studio, (with many successful albums having been mastered to it) but DAT as a format, failed to succeed in the domestic market.
One of the most unusual tape recorders released during the golden period of the 1980s, is without a doubt, the Akai MG14D, a tape based analogue recorder that offered excellent sound quality in a relatively compact chassis, released hot on the heels of a wave of digital multitrack recorders..
Tascam, in 1988, pulled off the impossible by releasing the Tascam 238 Syncaset and cramming 8 tracks onto a single cassette tape, and somehow they got it to work without compromising sound quality.
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