new boys, advice on best kit

[fikel]

new to the scene over here in UK, looking to buy a digitial 8 track m/c. so far I am looking at Fostex VF08, Zoom 1044 and Tascam 788.
Any views on these welcome or sugestions of comparable m/c pls
Was considering not having an internal CD writer hoping to use an external unit but not sure how you would wire up to a PC or external CD/wr to record final master tracks
this will help me for now
thank you in advance for any advice

 

[F_cksia]

I've used only the Fostex once with great succes, the rest I don't know that well. You could also think about recording to a computer, if you already have a rather good one, it's better for the visual aspect and so on, but you'll need a good soundcard.

For the mixdown; just connect the line-out of the Fostex or whatever to your computer's line-in, hit record on comp and play on the multitracker, after you've created a good-sounding mix.
Quite easy, hey?

 

[PeteHalo]

Forget about those limited featured 8-tracks and get a Fostex VF-16. It's only 666 euros at www.musicstorekoeln.de. It has 4 times the features of VF-08 and not that much more expensive. I've had one for 18 months and I know of many other people who own one and it's a great machine for the money. The best feature of VF16 is it's expandability. If you need to input more than 8 tracks, no prob, just plug in an 8 channel ADDA converter or digital mixer and you can have 16 tracks at a time. If you want to work with computer just get a soundcard with adat i/o and you'll be able to transfer 8 tracks at a time between the machines, even in real time if you decide to use the VF16 as recording mixer and track directly to a multitrack program running on computer.