TASCAM MidiStudio 688 8-Track Cassette Recorder 1990s - Black

great cosmetic condition very clean, will need work mainly changing belts. Eight-track made easy - where once there was a mountain of boxes and a tangle of spaghetti, Tascam's 688 Midistudio offers you the convenience of eight tracks, MIDI sync and mix automation in one friendly unit. WERE IT possible for a machine to be born with a split personality, the Tascam 688 Midistudio would be a prime candidate for the psychiatrist's couch. It's big and butch, yet surprisingly compact and neatly laid out. It will be out of the financial reach of many people, yet it's excellent value for money. It restricts you in some of the ways you might choose to use an eight-track recording system, yet it's capable of opening up wholly unexplored areas of control of the recording process. An obvious case of the Jekyll and Hydes, you'll agree. But let's look at these conflicting characteristics a little more closely... First of all, size - though Tascam have been careful not to hang a "Portastudio" tag on it (a tag which they invented), the 688 is, undeniably, a studio which is portable - in a way that a ten-channel mixer, eight-track tape deck, electronic patchbay and MIDI sync unit usually are not. That said, it would take a healthy young gorilla to carry the 688 any distance - a human being would need to be equipped with a small cargo hold. The 688 is heavy, and very large by Portastudio standards. Yet in comparison with the equipment it replaces, it's beautifully compact, ergonomically designed and quite stylish in a quiet, businesslike sort of way. Secondly, cost - as we emerge from the "economic miracle" of the last ten years, fewer and fewer people seem prepared to opt for credit as a means of raising finance for new equipment. The alternative, in this particular case, involves saving over two thousand pounds, and that, for most people, demands almost monastic self-restraint. If, however, you decide that life is quite meaningless without an eight-track system (and the ink has not yet dried on your contract with the devil), then you're simply not going to find a more economic proposition than the 688 without going secondhand. And even then you'd be hard pressed to achieve this sort of quality for under two grand. Thirdly, flexibility - inevitably, when four distinct pieces of recording gear are hardwired and packed together in a single shell, you're going to discover things you cannot do with them which you could with individual components. However, the logistics of combining a fully-featured, professional ten-channel (20-input) mixing desk with an eight-track logic-controlled tape deck (with simultaneous recording across all tracks) and built-in tape synchronisation has meant the inclusion of a programmable electronic patchbay was pretty much essential. And given the fact that it comes with almost 100 memory locations and has been put under MIDI control, the possibilities opened up by such a system (particularly for the musician with MIDI at the heart of his or her existing setup) far outweigh any limitations imposed by the individual components being contained within one cabinet. EIGHT-TRACK MIND FOR MOST PEOPLE, though, I suspect the most graphic illustration of the 688's dual personality would be the adoption of the humble audio cassette on what is clearly a high-quality eight-track recording system. Not that squeezing eight tracks onto 1/8" tape is anything new. The first machines to drop this particular technological bombshell appeared a couple of years ago now. But the scepticism which surrounded the viability of the format has never fully dissipated and doubts still remain as to its validity - even on semi-professional equipment. From my point of view, the 688 represents the first chance I've had to get to grips with an eight-track cassette-based system, having been using a ¼" reel-to-reel machine over the last three years. And I can only say that at the end of some fairly exhaustive listening tests, whatever doubts I had were completely dispelled. Using Maxell XL11-S on the 688 and Ampex Grand Master on the reel-to-reel, I could detect no appreciable difference in frequency response, and a barely perceptible drop in overall dynamic range. The differences became more marked after a first bounce, but with eight tracks and MIDI control over mixer channels, bouncing down clearly isn't the necessity it would be with (say) a four-track system. Following the recording process through to its logical conclusion (mastering onto a stereo cassette recorder), whatever differences I had encountered in terms of dynamics weren't just reduced proportionately, they vanished completely. And the same was true of mastering onto a borrowed Aiwa DAT recorder. I was drawn to the conclusion that with the 688, I could produce demos every bit as good (or bad) as I could with my reel-to-reel system - but with much less cost, and much more convenience. MIX WITH QUALITY AFTER REVIEWING THE 644 four-track Midistudio back in the…