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Well, after finishing up AWare, I thought it would be fun (?!) to build a backup audio extractor for Roland MTR's too. It would give me an excuse to pick one up on eBay and play around with it at least. Back when the first VS-880's came out I used to dream of trading in my old Tascam 4-track and upgrading to such an awesome machine...
Well, I picked up a VS-880EX for $100 on craigslist. The VS-880EX is an 8 track recorder, with 20bit AD/DA and it records audio in a 16-bit compressed format. It can do 16 bit uncompressed, like the 16G, but it reduces the track count to 6 tracks.
My thought was to sell my 16G, and just use the VS-880EX while I work on more software and save up for an AW2400.
It's probably stupid to write a review of an 11 year old device, but my initial impressions of it is...
1.) Longer and much nicer track faders than the 16G. Wish Yamaha had used these sliders instead.
2.) Plastic construction. Feels like a toy compared to the 16G.
3.) It's tiny little 2Gb hard drive makes a LOT of clicking noises. Don't use a condenser mic near this MTR.
4.) No XLR jacks or phantom power. Bummer.
So, I played around with it for a week and recorded a few test songs. I'm here to tell you, I WON'T be selling my 16G. Instead, once I've gotten the data I need from the Roland I will be selling it on ebay.
Here's why.
1.) If you think the 16G is confusing, you have no idea just what it means to be confused!
OMG the vs-880 is a nightmare to navigate. I'm no novice to tape or digital mtr's, and a few times I got so turned around in the VS's layered mixer scheme that I couldn't get it to play audio anymore. The audio was there... I could see the meters moving up and down, but I had changed so many settings that I was hopelessly lost. I just gave up and re-formatted the machine to get all the settings back to normal.
2.) Compared to the screen on the VS-880EX, the AW16G screen is like a giant HD cinema display. I mean, wow. The Roland display is a very sad, not funny joke. I could go on for pages about just how hard it is to navigate and read information, but it's not really worth it.
3.) The Roland hard drives are split up into tiny little partitions. Which partition did I store that last song on? I don't know, I guess I'll have to try and look for it on this tiny little one-line display. Ugh.
4.) Very rough EQ. It defaults to 2-band eq, but you can change the system to use the 3-band eq, with parametric mid (oooh)... high and low are still shelving type EQ's though. Yuck. EQ is way too important to suffer through this.
5.) No internal CD burner, and the external SCSI burners STILL sell for about $150 on ebay. No way!
It's not ALL bad though. There are a few things about the VS that are nice.
1.) The mic preamps.
Yes, the roland has mic pre's that are generally regarded as crap but, honestly, they are a LOT better than the 16G. I can turn them all the way up to max and not get any noticeable hiss. I also got several a slightly hotter signal than the 16G. I was actually able to record an acoustic guitar with an SM57 and got levels that were ok... not as hot as I would have liked, but much better than the 16G.
2.) The sound.
Compressed audio audio or not, it sounds really good. Not at all sterile, but rather nice and 'warm' (to use a meaningless, overused phrase)
3.) The effects.
Wow. Sorry Yamaha, but Roland's reverbs from 1998 blow the socks off of yours.
Still, home recording with the 16G is an absolute joy compared to using a vintage Roland.
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