Fostex FD-4 or Boss Br-8?

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BrettB

BrettB

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I can buy a Boss Br-8 and a Fostex FD-4 for about the same price. The Br-8 has effects, 8 tracks and virtuak tracks. What are the advantages of the FD-4? Which one should I buy?
 
I would buy the Boss because it has a zip drive to store songs and it has 8 tracks. The sound quality isn't much different between the two. Do you have a reverb or effects ? If not, then the Boss has effects proccessors built in and that can be really nice to have. I do think that the Fostex is a great machine but 4 tracks is such a limitation. Both machines will do what you probably want. Good luck.
 
Brett, I would certainly go for the BR-8. I own both a 4 track recorder (Sony MDM 4) and a BR-8. Given twice the tracks, the pretty decent sound processor in the BR-8, and it's editing capabilities, I don't even touch the 4 track anymore. The sound recording quality is great in the BR-8, and although it does have it's limitations (records two tracks at a time max, uses zip disks for storage), you probably won't find better for the price.

If you want to hear some examples of what stuff sounds like on the BR-8, check out www.mp3.com/merrycherry. Everything on that site was recorded using the BR-8.

good luck!

ranchfield
 
All I can say about the Fostex (I believe it's digital) is that the tracks you lay down=the final outcome. What I mean is that as there are no effects or other internal options except the mixer then it's up to your external capabilities. The fostex is a good machine and will give results but if you can get an 8-track with effects I don't think I need to say which you should buy.

However I have not tryed the Br-8.
 
Thanx for the comments. I'm only a bit concerned about the zip drive of the Br-8... How many minutes can I record on a 100 Meg Zip Drive?
thx, bye!
 
I have a br-8. I must say the two drawbacks mentioned earlier really do suck. Im working on a demo for my band right now and i can only fit about two songs on each disk. when the disk is first initialized you get i think 42 minutes for all 8 tracks. In other words say you have 42 minutes available on track one... if your record 2 minutes of sound on track one it will take you down to 40 minutes available for all the other tracks too. And of course if you record say the drums in stereo, youd get half the time as compared to if you recorded them in mono. Thats about all the shit i can talk on that machine though, cuz its amazing. It made my boss gt-3 guitar effects processor obsolete. I dont have to mic my guitar amp to get a good guitar sound. I can plug straight in and get a sound thats as good as my marshall. It has an awesome tempo map feature that lets you program a metronome to change tempos at certain measures in the song. its also great for practicing guitar late at night cuz hey, if you get an idea, just hit record. Oh yea, it took me like maybe an hour to get the hang of, which is pretty quick. within about two days i had it all figured out.
 
I purchased a BR-8 about two months ago and I love it. Song length might be an issue for some folks but not me, as I tend to keep 'em short (3-4 minutes).

It also helps to erase unwanted tracks as you put your song together, and to use the "Optimize Song" function. This can bring your available recording time way up...from five minutes to 25 or 30. Good luck!
 
Just to clarify that last post of mine...when you're running out of disk time while recording a song, you can erase and optimize to get your available time back up. You might be on your sixth or seventh track and will notice that you only have five minutes left....erase and optimize some unused stuff and you'll leave yourself with plenty of disk time.
 
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