Recording Studio Equipment

wow. i am amazed. sounds good, easy to use, and for this price? built in chromatic tuner, metronome, effects galore, record them wet, or just monitor them dry.. slave another one and you have 32 tracks… simple, intuitive, makes me actually want to record again! thanks Samson! bravo! (i bought two)

It came the day before a gig, I had no time to test it. My wife (not a tech person) took it to the FOH near the mixer and monitored the gain to prevent clipping. Recorded 1 and 1/2 hours using the built in Mics. Of course it picked up all the crowd chatter and applause a bit overwhelmingly, but recorded the show with absolute clarity.
I have just recieved word from Zoom that 64 bit drivers for windows 7 will be out early this year (2010) so I look forward to using it with my laptop.

In one word, “incredible”.
Due to the multitrack input capabilities it becomes quicker & easier than
computer based programs & equipment.
The Tascam 2488 Neo Multitrack Digital Recorder makes professional home recording a reality for almost anyone.

I’ve had the BR-600 now for three months and have created several songs that I am overjoyed with. The box is fairly small and turns out some really nice sounding production–professional quality to my admittedly hobbiest ears. The upside is that the system is fairly easy to use–it gets easier with practice–and there are no recording artifacts like white noise, tape noise, etc. Onboard effects for guitar and bass guitar are great. There are a few downsides, however. The biggest is that this is a complex system that takes a lot of time to master. You can do simple songs within a couple of hours of opening the box, but there are so many features that the average Joe will never learn them all. I don’t think I’ve used more than 10% of the system’s capability yet. The other downside are the drum tracks. While there are many of them, and there is a cool way to layout drum arrangements for songs, none of the tracks really seem to suit my needs (basic rock and roll and basic jam band styles). In theory you can create your own drum patterns with the touch-sensitive buttons, but I haven’t yet figured out how to do this well. Seems like you need two VERY talented and agile fingers to make a useful pattern. But all of these are fairly minor gripes if you aren’t looking to be a Grammy winning ar-teest quite yet. Overall the system does all that I need it to do–record four to eight track songs, add effects, mix, and then transfer to my computer. I transfer the songs in .aiff format to I-Tunes and then either play them through my I-Pod on my home stereo system, burn them to CD, or convert them to MP3 to share with friends. All of my friends think the recordings were done professionally!

Pros:
- Excellent sound quality.
- Built-in, high-quality stereo condenser mics.
- Tons of features in a very small package.
- Battery or AC power.
- Balanced mic inputs. They are not XLR connectors but they are balanced, so as long as you use a balanced XLR to 1/4″ adapter, you get fully balanced quality inputs from your XLR mic inputs. One balanced adapter is included.
- 64 virtual tracks allow you to record 8 tracks then bounce a mix onto two virtual tracks and then record even more tracks while listening to the mix you’ve already recorded. You can continue to add tracks this way until all 64 virtual tracks are full. The great thing is that, as long as you don’t record over your original recordings then you can still remix everything either in the machine or by dumping all of the tracks to your computer and mixing it there.
- You can record your tracks dry (no effects) but still hear the effects while you record. This allows you to edit or change the effects during the final mix rather than being stuck with the effects that were recorded with the track.
- Ability to dump all of your data to computer for backup.
- Ability to dump all of the tracks from your recording onto a computer where you can edit them with your audio editing application of choice. You can download the software to do this free from Boss’s website.
- Built in drum machine. It sounds pretty good and is fully programmable. Plus, it has its own dedicated stereo track so it does not take up any of the 8 recording tracks. You can even load in tones from CD, computer or another drum machine or sound module.
- Built-in effects that sound pretty good, are customizable, and allow you to add stereo loop effects to individual mono tracks for your final mix and really add some thickness and stereo richness to your mix.
- Very well though out design and fairly easy to use – once you get the basics down.
- Excellent manual! I’ve heard a lot of people bashing the manual but I think it’s great. Very well thought out and easy to use. Yes, it’s thick and full of information and words and stuff. But this machine is packed full of features so it required more than a pamphlet to explain it all. And they do a great job of presenting the information in a tutorial format as well as in an easily accessible reference format so you can either look up something quickly or spend some time reading and learning in depth.

Cons:
- No phantom power for microphones. You have to use an external mic preamp or phantom power adapter.
- A/C adapter not included.
- Should come with a larger memory card. The included card is virtually useless. Buy a 1GB card that has been tested (see the chart on Boss’s website). Anything larger than 1 GB is not supported and some brands and formats will not work.
- Tracks 5/6 and 7/8 are locked as stereo pairs. This means that you cannot record two separate instruments onto these two tracks and have individual control. I don’t know why they made half of the tracks on the machine locked like this but it’s not that big of a deal because you can work around it by bouncing tracks. Basically, you can record either stereo instruments like keyboards, etc. onto these tracks or you can use them to bounce portions of your song onto and then continue recording more tracks.
- The learning curve is not terribly steep but you will have to spend some time learning the system to get the most out of it. If you have a basic understanding of recording, effects, drum machine programming then you will catch on pretty quick.
- Because of the small size of the machine, plus the fact that it has a full set of drum pads, there isn’t much room for a lot of buttons so you do have to dig around in the menus a lot to edit tracks or program the drums, etc., which can slow things down. But once you learn where thing are and how they work you can navigate through the menus pretty quickly.

Conclusion:
A fantastic, portable machine with tons of features and excellent sound that will fulfill almost any need from recording quick ideas or live performances to recording your own album. BUY IT NOW!!!