Derek Verner said:
When Teac and Tascam started, they were run by the Japanese who were concerned with excellence. Today, they are run by Americans whose main concern is the bottom line. Nuff sed.
I disagree.
When TASCAM started out, they were not concerned with excellence at all. They were concerned with offering a cheaper alternative to the completely professional high end market where multi-track machines were selling in the 200,000 dollar range and matching consoles were also in the same neighborhood, price wise.
TASCAM originally aimed their products at high end home users and low budget commercial users who were budgeting to spend perhaps 20 grand on a complete studio which would include all the extras of monitoring, processing, microphones, cabling and acoustic treatment.
Professional studios in those days were easily budgeting 100 times that amount of money and more.
It wasn't until the advent of digital recording that industry standards and pricing for analog equipment began to slide and disappear, selling off their aging and worn out equipment for pennies on the dollar to keep current and go digital.
TASCAM's evolution and quality curve is little more then a mirror of what the market would bear as they emerged with questionable products at the outset, improved them but, kept costs about the same and then abandoned them just as they saw everyone else doing the digital cross-over and now offer only a handful of analog hangover products that were designed in a previous century.
TASCAM has indeed lost their way these days as they have nothing unique to offer the industry and nothing to cheapen and under-cut but the rest of an industry that is struggling to create an identity and reason to exist in this ravenous market.
Please don't misunderstand me. I own, love and use their gear from the 80's, when they were at their apex of quality. As a home recording enthusiast, I could have never afforded to buy real professional high end gear and would have had to go to a professional recording studio to get demos done of my band's music if TASCAM had not started the affordable revolution of allowing people like me to buy gear one piece at a time as I could afford it and have the benefit of learning and recording at my own speed. This was the true revolution that TASCAM gave us all.
Now, we are in a cheap digital world and TASCAM will be but a page in history from a by-gone era and state of evolution.
Cheers!