br 1600 cd

[daveyP]

Hey there,

Can anyone give me some advice here. Im finally upgrading from 4track analgue recording (Tascam Porta7) to a digital Boss Br1600CD 16track machine.
Anyone know anything that i need to know about this machine? Limitations etc.

Is it easy to use if your familar with 4 trach recording?
Is it easy to link up with Cubase SX (which im yet to learn how to use!) - and what wires do i need to connect up to my PC?
Is the burn of the final mixes to CD of a good (loud) quality?
Are the drums programable like, say the Alesis SR16 drum machine?
I understand it is a 16 track but do you get all 16 to use as i would have all 4 to use freely on my four track?
All 'virtual tracks' the same as bounced tracks - if so, is the quality good - my four track lost a lot of quality when bouncing to increase tracks.
Help someone, or all of you!!
Cheers!

daveyP

 

[FunkDaddy]

I can't answer all your questions but what I can tell you is that it's VERY easy to jump into the BR1600 and get recording, it's the first machine of any type I've used to record music, I basically skimmed the manual and hopped into recording. There's probably a lot of stuff I don't even know how to use or utilize to the fullest extent lol.

It's possible to use the Mastering functions to get VERY good quality CD mixes.

Re: 16 tracks. There are 8 XLR channels, 1 stereo drum track, 1 stereo bass track, 1 stereo loop phrase track and the stereo bounce track. You can set it up so all of them are 16 tracks of audio but you can only record 8 tracks max at a time I believe.

I'm not sure about using virtual tracks to bounce tracks. As I understand it (again..>I just skimmed the manual ) Virtual tracks are simply used to have more than 1 take per channel. Like having a bunch of guitar takes that you can cut together, while using up only 1 channel.

 

[The First Don]

Is it easy to use if your familar with 4 trach recording?
Is it easy to link up with Cubase SX (which im yet to learn how to use!) - and what wires do i need to connect up to my PC?
Is the burn of the final mixes to CD of a good (loud) quality?
Are the drums programable like, say the Alesis SR16 drum machine?

^ read the manual at Bossus.com


I understand it is a 16 track but do you get all 16 to use as i would have all 4 to use freely on my four track?

It will play back 16 tracks. It probabily has some limitation as far as recording on multiple tracks at the same time (probabily 8 max im guessing.) All the recorders I've seen have some limit to recording on multiple tracks at the same time.

In a nutshell its like having 4 four track recorders all in one.

All 'virtual tracks' the same as bounced tracks - if so, is the quality good -
Not the same as bouncing tracks. Virtual tracks are the same as having more tracks to record on but the machine is still limited to 16 play back tracks altogether. For example track 1 could have 8 virtual tracks. This means that track one is 8 tracks in itself, however limited to 1 playback track at a time.

So when it says that theres a total of 256 (or whatever) tracks thats how many tracks there virtually are if you have the equipment available to mix down that many tracks.

When however you do bounce tracks. The original tracks are stored in the virtual tracks that they were created on. So you can preform the bounce again if it really sucks.