Why are you focusing on 20+ year old *digital* technology? You're going to be hamstrung by hardware that is not supported and cannot be fixed without buying a bunch of donors and hoping. That's my $.02. I'd say if you were obsessed with analog, Ok, go have fun finding 2" tape or whatever, but in the digital world, it's moving along so fast and getting cheaper, folks just toss the old stuff, or try to sell it on Reverb, I suppose. There are rack-mountable digital recorders up to 64-tracks that will write directly to a USB [SSD] drive or whatever, which is the storage media of the day, but you could try to find a fast enough HDD I suppose that wouldn't choke on 24-tracks at 48kHz/24-bits, maybe. Check the listings at VintageKing.com, for instance.
All good points, but not everybody wants the latest tech. The other side of that is if you want to use older tech then there are things to tackle with obsolescence whether in trying to find replacements for wear items, or compatibility issues. For hard drives often times it is possible to convert to SSD or some other solid state media like compact flash. But how hard this is varies greatly, and even then it doesn’t work perfectly. A couple personal examples: I have a Yamaha AW4416 standalone DAW workstation. This is a scalable digital mixer/24-bit 16-track hard disk recorder. The mixing section is based on the popular 02R. I love it because the mixing section is very flexible and powerful…two option slots for add-on cards with a LOT of I/O options digital and analog, professional build quality, awesome user community support…thousands of these units are still going strong almost 25 years after coming on the market. Is it as powerful as a typical computer-based DAW? Heck no, but it’s powerful…44 inputs, comprehensive dynamics, gating and EQ on each channel, 8 aux busses, 8 mix groups, two stereo onboard effects engines, 17 motorized faders, to name the highlights…and why I like using it more than a computer-based DAW is it is all self-contained and there are never any updates…no OS obsolescence, no driver conflicts with updates, no multiple boxes to interconnect…self-contained, truly portable but heavy-duty and feature-rich and most importantly it sounds good…purpose-built for audio production. I use a computer-based DAW too, but a lot of people like the AW for the reasons I just listed. It just *works* and works well and the GUI doesn’t change…I hate software DAW version changes. Like, I often appreciate the added features and of course bug fixes and all, but I *hate* having to get used to menu changes, location of control changes, interface changes…the AW is the same every time I turn it on and one can then more easily get VERY acclimated to how to use it fully. And THAT to me is more powerful than a computer-based DAW with more bells and whistles, because, IMO, 100% of the time it’s more important not WHAT tools you have, but whether or not you know how to use them fluently. Okay. But to the issue of the storage media, yes…IDE PATA interface for the a hard drive, and only up to a certain capacity will work. And it’s getting harder and harder to find them new, and at this point I’m pretty certain they are all NOS. This stuff ages and wears to some degree just sitting on a shelf. An unused HDD that is 1 year old will last longer than an unused HDD that is 15 years old. So I switched to using CF media. And yes there was a mildly frustrating process of figuring out what adapter would work as well as what media. And CF media has a shelf life too. And once I found the adapter and media combo that worked for me (thanks entirely to user community help), I still have to accept a compromise: as track count approaches 16, if the project is a 24-bit project, the audio scrub function doesn’t work 100% as it is supposed to. You can scrub slowly forward and it sounds right, but as you scrub faster the audio plays back in regular time with gaps between to make up for the slower playback speed. And then this happens at all scrub speeds in reverse. So if you’re looking for a point in the timeline you can scrub slowly forward and hear the audio in contiguous in-time playback…as you pass the point and want to scrub back to audition again it does the gap thing and then you scrub forward slowly again…rinse and repeat. Not as convenient as designed but works. These are the kinds of things to varying degrees people need to consider if they are using old tech. I also have a couple Roland VSR-880 8-track 24-bit HDRs…why? They simply sound damn good. Sure…they only go up to 48kHz sample rate. Sure they are a bit cumbersome to navigate if you want to actually use their onboard mixing features, which I don’t, but I don’t care. They sound awesome. And they are well-built. That’s one of the main issues I have with more contemporary equipment. Except for the very high-end and boutique markets, I promise you manufacturers are NOT finding ways how they can produce products that are higher quality designs and make less money. They *always* do the opposite…they are finding ways to reduce manufacturing costs in order to make more money, and they do that through cheaper physical designs and cheaper circuit designs. And often times the marketing people get the consumer community to believe the cheaper design actually works or sounds better, and then that’s what everybody wants. And so it goes. And as technology has advanced and things can be made smaller and manufactured through automated processes, there is a cost to longevity and serviceability. So the Roland is built to last, very little of it is SMT technology, mostly through-hole PCB construction, so a guy like me can work on it…and I believe a through-hole design will last longer, and sound better than an equivalent SMT circuit. Period. Sometime last year I opened up one of my VSR-880s to take a look at the design, and I got answers to why it sounds so good…quality opamps, quality passive components, quality converters, and when I got ahold if the service manual and studied the signal path I got even more answers…the signal path includes intentional engineering/design decisions that are more expensive to build but afford better sound. This does NOT mean every 20-25 year old standalone multitrack HDR is going to sound “better”. First you have to use your ears…trust them…but then I like to verify by looking at the design. And in the case of the VSR-880 I got a lot of validating answers when I did that. And it’s easy to use if you’re using it like a tape machine. Which is what I do. So I like it. Now…just like with the Yamaha, but even worse, is the issue with the HDD. IDE PATA but only up to 12GB will work. Forget it. I have successfully converted it to work with SD flash media, and it 100% works great. But it was a pure PITA to figure it out and it was only accomplished with the vastly waning user community support for this particular device. So I agree it is way easier to just look at what is current or recent as far as products on the market, but sometimes people have peculiar priorities like me, where I don’t like how most the stuff is built today, and I can’t easily work on it, or it’s a quasi-disposable product…don’t agree with that design ideology at all…and sometimes something from back a ways actually sounds good because “they don’t make them like they used to” and the product was designed to hit a certain mark and wasn’t yet “value engineered”, so it actually sounds good and works well. And…because it’s “obsolete” you can get them for $100. Each to their own.
