Tascam Studio Bridge

Very interesting. This is exactly what I was looking for a few years ago for my rehearsal studio / drum room. I even like that it looks sort of old and dated.

Sort of like the poor man’s Radar.

Yep, a less featured Radar.

They have made some incredibly cool and useful stuff over the years. I do wish I still had my PortaStudio 4-track.

Does this link work for others?

Well that's why I referred to it as the "poor man's" RADAR! 

But you gotta admit, it's pretty cool.

Yeah. Where was this thing when I was 22? I'd have been all over this. I had the 4 track Portastudio, but this new thing would have been awesome at that time.

For me the interest is more in the I/O than the hard disk recording aspect. I see this as a very clean 24 I/O for patching in my console with some nice monitoring features to go along with it. The hard disk recording is secondary.

So I'm comparing it to my paired up Motu 24 AO and AI and thinking that for half the price of that pair I can get the same I/O along with some tactile methods for switching between monitoring through the board or from the DAW. If I were to do that, I'd probably use the hard disk feature occasionally for the random jam session type things where it'd be nice to just press a button and capture, but anything serious would go through the DAW.

If the conversion is decent (and why wouldn't it be, Tascam has always ranged from passable to good depending on their product range in my understanding) it's quite the bargain for that use case.

The other use case would be in my mixing room where I literally have zero need for anything other than line in and line out. In this case the lack of ADAT would hurt me a little bit and would probably make this inappropriate for that use but if I didn't have so much centered around my Cranborne 500ADAT (I do all conversion in mixing through the Cranborne, not just the 500 series stuff) it would be a nice fit there too.

The mic pres and converters in my old Tascam HS-p82 are actually quite good. So I believe Tascam has the ability to make a great product. I suppose we will find out soon if this is one of them. The price makes me suspicious though.

I can see a place for this, but aren’t solid state multitrack recorders going for like $1k these days? Not sure why I’d buy this over a more pro ss recorder. I’d also rather have almost any analog mixer with built in SD card recorder (Presonous, Mackie, Tascam etc).

As far as conversion goes, it could be ok to great, but tascams small mixers, while being super fun and useful, don’t sound great…

I think converter quality is more dictated by power supply, isolation and audio path quality, the ADDA chips have been solid for a decade now

This thread reignited my desire for a dawless setup for recording. Is there such a thing as a digital-only Radar?

This Tascam would have been really cool if it had a bunch of ADAT/AES inputs so we could bring our own converters, and and a nice, large remote.

Arming tracks and the ability to punch in and basic transport control are all I ask.

I wonder if a Radar can be had cheap if its converters have been scavenged. I just want to use that beautiful remote and not have to look at a goddamn screen while recording.

Really needs a remote. Six dsub's get clunky fast. This thing really needs to be racked or it will be very cumbersome. 

And this would work great for DAW-less setup for sure. But I can't envision doing any punches without a DAW. Never want to go back to that. Overdubs? Sure. Punches, no thanks.