Digital recording workstations

[phoebes13]

Hi! Wondering if anyone has experience with the currently available stand-alone digital recording workstations i.e. Tascam 2488 Neo vs Boss BR-1600CD. Unfortunately, the music stores in my city don't carry any so I have to pick one and then "special order" it.

I recently lost everything in a house fire so I'm looking to replace my 8-track ADAT with a stand alone digital recorder that is the "closest thing to analog". It's mostly going to be used for home demos, if more intensive editing would be required I'd dump it onto the computer...

Any suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks

[stainless]

I don't have direct  experience with either that you've mentioned-

with the standalones I would look for a couple of things

That it doesn't have a proprietary format (meaning you could take tracks from it onto another platform (without it being a major conversion)... and visa versa

That it will allow you to record mono/single tracks, and not everything in stereo so you have either a Left or a Right output... or a stereo track panned down the middle

and it will work with third party plug-ins

and it'd be nice to have  a unit that has  truly by-passable pre-amps so you could use external pre-amps without going through another layer of gain control/circuitry

[phoebes13]

Good points. Thanks for the input!

[kip4]

in the past i have used a Yamaha aw1600 (probably a bit dated now)
its 8 input
nice sounding and quite intuative to use, over all i liked the unit. Just my two pence

[stainless]

my nit about the Yamahas (and maybe this has now changed) is it required a separate utility program to convert the tracks to stand-alone .wav 9and the conversion file is/was only available for PC)  which if you're a Mac user this takes a bit more legwork.

A friend (my bass player actually) has 1 16 channel and it records everything as stereo pairs, and while you can do a mono input (one channel) you're restritced to it being on the L or the R

and it wouldn't/couldn't run VST's

but perhaps the new ones have addressed these issues, the conversion was a bit of a complaint