I don't understand why something so well regarded could cost only $80
Tascam 58-OB VGC $125
Tascam 48-OB VGC $125
Tascam M-520, needs TLC but all there and will clean up nice $80
Some personal examples from my own collection...I've been baffled myself.
If with cjacek. Like he said:
I think a lot of it at least with the Teac/Tascam gear is that it was regarded as the poor-man's gear of the day even though it was, IMO, well-built and richly featured, and much of it absolutely shines in the sea of "budget" gear of today. A vintage small-format Teac/Tascam mixer will, as you have noticed, cost literally a fraction of the cost of a contemporary mixer with the same channel count, and still have many more features and greater flexibility. For something more contemporary check out the "lowly" Tascam 1508...packed with features you wouldn't find on any other mixer of the day or today in anywhere near that price-range...saw one go on eBay the other day for $60 I think? Needed the PSU but its just a wall-wart and could probably be sourced at Radio Shack...So that's one factor...the market didn't really understand Tascam gear at the time, Tascam didn't really try hard to
educate the market, and today I think what little was understood by people outside the circle of knowledge has faded into the shadows. Forum members that lived and worked through that era can shed much more light, but that is some of what I've picked up.
Also, like cjacek said, most people in our fast-food culture don't want to have to dicker. Let's face it...the older it gets, the more TLC it will need. "Old" is so cast-off in our culture. Often times an old mixer, if its going to work "like new", is going to have to be taken apart, cleaned, sometimes recapped and sometimes require some components to replaced. If yer not picky, the symptoms of these things can many times just be ignored and you're up and going right out of the box. But if you
do like to explore and learn and get to know your gear and make it function "like new" or in some cases better than new, the "vintage" stuff can't be beat, especially the Teac/Tascam stuff. Silly-deflated market prices, full-featured, sturdily built and great learning tools...built back in the day when stuff was meant to be serviced rather than tossed out, and built with a longer service life in mind.
BTW, another phantom power option would be to wire in another XLR jack on your M-30 (if you get it) and daisy-chain a wire from the new jack to the two wires that carry the phantom power on each MIC input, then you just use a single channel external phantom supply. It'll be a global supply, but this way you needn't worry about trying to fit something inside. This is the way Tascam did it with the MX-80 rackmount 8-channel preamp unit.
... but sorry,... not lofi!!
