the BUG SOUND total open-reel experience w/ Fostex R8

Heh heh heh suckers I now own all the reel-to-reel machines in Waco (Probably!) It's such a cultural void that there were probably only about three or four of them in the first place

Well I think that MCC still has their Sony/MCI 24-track and that mountain of reels of (surely sticky) Ampex 456, but I'd have to like pawn my car to buy it

Anybody want to sell me another control panel, the Model 8544 remote extension cable, or a better mixer than I've got?

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Fostex
• R8
• quarter-inch
• 8-track
• multitrack
• open-reel
• reel-to-reel

[efleck999]

Your room will eventually be nothing but wires... where you couldn't walk in without feeling like you're caught in a web... WATCH OUT FOR SNAKES!

Pulp Fiction? Didn't your friend make that movie? (I'm KIDDING)

[pdmillar]

@efleck999 Well I'll probably move out within a couple of months. Space Enough for Wires.

And I know tgies completely looks like quentin tarantino (Hilarious)

[woskhali]

Sounds pretty good on Youtube. How would you rate its audio overall? I think I'm going to get an R8, because my back is too gimpy to lift a 1" multitrack, and I can't afford the tape for it anyway. I heard the capstans suck and are impossible to find

I wish 8-bus mixers weren't 175 pounds and impossible to find in working condition for a real price

[pdmillar]

@woskhali This one's supposedly almost brand new, or very low hours, according from the guy I bought it from who was the first owner. I still had the usual problem with the capstan motor pulley (made of nylon) getting hairline cracks around its hub and slipping off. Hasn't come off since I superglued it.

[ganzha6667]

Hey! I have got one Fostex R8 and Fostex 20!

[MarcoZ1ITA1]

I want that 488, damn it.

[Beshrewed]

I want that song. :)

[woskhali]

@pdmillar You want the ST. Absolutely solid MIDI, no jitter at all. Only thing better is using CV on pure analogs. It takes a while to learn the software (I'm still learning it), and it's not quite as polished as modern DAWs, but it also doesn't sound terrible so it kinda evens out. Also Cubase can be hard to find sometimes.

The big problem is that eBay sucks these days and everything's either way too much money for old beat-up crap or it's broken.

[pdmillar]

@woskhali Badass! I really want an ST to run my sequences, the MIDI timing on my PC is awful. I have an SMPTE->MIDI synchronizer but I can't use it because the PC falls out of sync.

[woskhali]

@pdmillar Right on, I think I'll hunt one down then. Recording is my last bit of modern digital stuff. I'm finding that the less I use computers (and when I have to use one, using a really old one), the better my sound is. Computers are terrible. I'm sequencing with an Atari ST now with Cubase from 1991, and it works awesome.

[pdmillar]

@woskhali Man the audio is great, the top end is so clean, but it's a little too noisy to use without the Dolby C NR. Fortunately that doesn't really screw with the sound in any way that I have noticed. There seems to be a pretty pronounced head-bump about maybe 100 Hz, but I haven't tried to measure that. Tones I recorded all came back at 0 VU without me having to try to calibrate it (no MRL here.)