In case you've ever wondered what it would be like to electronically trick one of these out, this guy did it...
(info from unit currently on ebay)
"Your one-time opportunity to own
a professionally (and intelligently) upgraded 388"
"You pretty much know what a Tascam 388 is, if you're looking at this page. Eight analog tracks on affordable and available 1/4" tape; with a full mixer included.
There's a lot more to it than that. There are mic preamps on every channel. The three eq controls on each channel are ALL sweepable. You can plug in to the channel or straight to the bus (more about that later). You can come right out of the tape preamp if you want, evading another pass through the channels, for higher fi. You can sync two 388s together. You can return to zero or to a cue point. There's an effects bus, a selectable pre/post aux output, and a separate monitor mix. And more, plenty more. This is not just a big Portastudio -- it is a real comprehensive tool for real work in real production facilities.
So what makes this particular 388 better than the others?
It has been Pooged. Pooge is an expression devised by Walt Jung, the engineer who researched and publicly exposed BOTH of the two most significant bottlenecks in quality audio in the chip age: Slew Rate limits and Dilectric Absorption. In this 388, all the channel op amps have been upgraded to 5532s, which are a fine-sounding audio chip whose imperfections are, for an IC, remarkably tubelike. And every one of these 5532s have been bandlimited (~70 kHz) to maintain closed loop performance to the limits of the chip itself. With expensive mica capacitors. You'd be surprised how seldom this is done, and how often manufacturers allow op amps to go into open-loop operation, which sends all kinds of spurious trash down into the audio.
Furthermore, each coupling capacitor position has been meticulously recalculated (considering every possible load on every output) so as not to have an unnecessarily large (and overly problematic) cap at that particular point. And each of those caps has been replaced by a Nichicon Muse high-fidelity cap (except a couple of positions where a mylar film capacitor would fit). AND, each of those new capacitors has been bypassed with a WIMA polypropylene capacitor, calculated to carry the majority of the signal, leaving only the bass to the Nichicons.
And by the way, those 388 preamps sound great, with fat and juice that (pardon me for saying it again) is almost tubelike.
And by the way, the local power supply capacitors on the cards have been significantly increased with larger high-quality Muse components as well.
And by the way, all this work had been done by an annoyingly meticulous tech who became a tech because nobody else could do work that was acceptable to him, him being me.
The 388 will come with an original owner's manual with all setup information, full schematics (with a couple of corrections by Yours Truly) and circuit board layouts.
AND....THERE IS MORE....
I'll also put in a couple of auxilliary boxes I made for this machine. One of them has a 1/4" phone jack and a bunch of output tails that plug into the bus inputs available at the back, so you can 100% bypass the channel and go right to the r/p cards. The switch selects which bus you want to connect to. The cables are unshielded, presuming that you are using solid-state (~150 ohm) sources like op amps). They are, if you care, 99.99% pure copper in polyethylene insulation.
The other box is a little oscillator that plugs into, and is powered by, the external control jack on the 388. It permits a wider range of speed adjustment than the narrow range provided on the front panel.
"Well, does that mean that I could crank the speed up to 11.25ips (between 7ips and 15ips), tweak the r/p trimpots to flatten out the frequency response, and get much better sound quality?"
My lips are sealed.
Happy Bidding!
PS I'm sorry to bloviate like this about this great machine but it really is a great machine.
PPS "We had this old Tascam from the Eighties with a reel-to-reel tape recorder inside the mixing board..." Billie Joe Armstrong talking about the Foxboro Hot Tubs album
PPS I forgot to mention that the chips in the r/p cards, the dbx, and the unbalanced output were upgraded as well. (I didn't use the balanced output.) I used some fancier chips in the areas that would see the whole mix. I forget exactly what's where. There are some 2134's, even a couple of 4562's (most recent design, relatively expensive, extremely clean) between the busses and the output."
...it still sounded really bad!
I think, tho, that 456 (or its equivalents) are the absolute max I'd run on the 388, if a lower op tape is not available or that's all you've got.