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From: little@sdcsvax.UUCP (Glenn Little)
Newsgroups: net.music.synth
Subject: Fostex Equipment
Message-ID: <1113@sdcsvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 21-Sep-85 21:59:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.1113
Posted: Sat Sep 21 21:59:22 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Sep-85 07:57:21 EDT
Organization: EECS Dept. U.C. San Diego
Lines: 36
Keywords: Fostex, 4-track cassettes

A little while back, there were a few articles mentioning Fostex equipment,
and most seemed to generally intimate a negative attitude toward the stuff.
I recently bought a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder (model 250...?  the 
"top of the line" one) and while it is still under warranty, would like
to find out if there are some problems I should be looking for.  What 
specifically do people dislike about Fostex in general, and the 250 in
particular?  

     I have not used it a whole lot yet, but so far it I am fairly
happy with it.  (It *is* currently in the shop... there seems to be
some distortion on one of the tracks when I record a Hammond organ
playing on the middle to lower half of the keyboard-- even when keeping the
levels reasonably low.  But to be fair, the organ does contain a lot of 
low frequency energy, and also it seems that every electronic component I buy
these days has something wrong with it.  :-{   )

     If anyone is interested, here is how I arrived at my decision to buy the
Fostex.  I pretty much looked at only three machines:  the Fostex, the new
Audio Technica, and the Tascam 244 (?) Porta-Studio.  The printed specs
all looked pretty similar to me.  The Audio-Technica had the best features, but
I painfully had to eliminate it because it just seemed a little too big.  I
really didn't want something too unwieldy (I am wondering now if maybe I should
have given less weight to the portability issue).  That left the Tascam and
the Fostex.  The Tascam had parametric eq, which I liked, but the Fostex had
Dolby C noise reduction (as opposed to dbx on the Tascam).  I figured they 
would all probably sound about the same, except that I had been told that
the cassette versions of dbx tended to noticeably "pump" with fluctations
in program volume.  I hate the pumping sound.  Whether or not it is really
true that the Tascam does this, I don't know.  I couldn't really test them
out.  But the dolby vs. dbx issue is what finally decided it for me in the
end.  Did I blow it?  Let me (or all of us on the net) know what you think.

					Thanks,

					Glenn Little