Whether through some insider information about the impending arrival of Ray Dolby's analogue resuscitation unit, or just a belief that there's still life in the old two-inch, 24 track, we seem to be witnessing a spate of new models, all appearing within the space of a year or so, many of which are aimed at the mid-to-high end of the market.

For Tascam, the ATR-80 is the first multitrack conforming to full professional standards, using two-inch tape and accepting reels up to 14 inches in diameter. It comes complete with a comprehensive remote unit and good-sized VU meters on the machine.

It looks very stylish, with its Next colour scheme not having quite the Germanic brushed aluminium robot look of a Studer, or the English functionality of a Soundcraft. The ATR-80 certainly seems constructed to a high mechanical standard.

At around £30,000 it is not a cheap machine, although it is carefully placed to compete with its closest rivals — the Soundcraft Saturn and the Otari MTR-90. It should be made clear at the start that this is a fairly conventional multitrack without the 1987 bells and whistles like Dolby HX-Pro, integral noise reduction or semi-auto alignment. But what it does, it does extremely well.

TASCAM HEADS

As with all other Tascam tape recorders, this machine uses heads manufactured and designed by Tascam, which gives them leave to experiment with novel ideas for reducing crosstalk etc. It was Tascam's design which gave them a two-track, centre-timecode record head which incorporated the audio gaps and the timecode gap in one head, with crosstalk as low as any of its rivals using separate heads, thereby eliminating the need for delay lines.

Looking at the ATR-80's heads it is obvious that they are different because there are four thin laminated layers of metal in between each track on both the record and replay heads, not something one expects to see normally.

I am told that these consist of layers of permalloy and copper, and that they aid the reduction of crosstalk between adjacent tracks — a parameter I measured, and which I will speak about later.

As in other Tascams, the record and replay heads are identical, having the same gap, which makes the record head ideal for monitoring in sync while recording because its frequency response is as good as the replay frequency response.

So far as I know, there is no other machine which claims this ability, and it is indeed a bonus, allowing mixdown from the sync head if necessary (bouncing down, for example) with no loss of top, as well as full bandwidth foldback while overdubbing.

Other features of the heads are the continuous contour, which gives the surface a constant radius (like part of a full circle) to ensure good tape-to-head contact, and a uniform wear characteristic to ensure that no part of the head wears more than others, resulting in ridges. The erase heads have dual gaps.

TRANSPORT

Tascam's first ad for this machine pushes it as the ideal post-production machine, having an extremely fast response to synchroniser control, and being able to whizz from place to place very quickly. Although I didn't have the chance to test it with a synchroniser, I was able to verify that the wind speed is high (taking one minute 23 seconds to wind a 10½ inch reel), and that the dynamic braking is about the fastest I've seen — with the machine screeching to a halt when stopped from full wind speed.

Happily, the machine passed the BBC test of pulling out the mains lead while winding at full speed, gliding gently to a stop without damaging anything!

In order to allow the user time to stop the machine before the tape runs off the end of the spool in fast wind, the ATR-80 slows down the tape into 'spooling' mode a few minutes from the end, although I can't see why it couldn't be made to stop the tape before the last few layers of tape are unwound.

Such a feature has been incorporated in many professional video recorders for years, but so far has only been used to my knowledge in one multitrack audio machine. With microprocessor control it is a fairly simple matter to calculate the relative reel speeds and inertias, and so determine the end of the reel. Since tape machines are often in separate rooms, it would be an invaluable feature to save someone having to go and relace the tape.

The tape counter on the front panel is in hours, minutes and seconds, and it is driven from a tachometer roller which seems to stick accurately to the tape. I made a mark on the tape at the beginning of a reel, zeroing the counter, and then wound to the end and back again to zero to find the mark only a few inches from where I had made it.

Coupled with the counter are a basic RTZ (return-to-zero) and a second cue memory with STC (search-to-cue), although there is no means of displaying what time is stored in the cue memory. The RTZ was very fast in locating, mainly because of the very quick braking and winding: the transport wound at full speed until only a few seconds away from zero, rather than the laborious slowing down in stages long before which is found on some machines.

An MCI-style ceramic capstan is employed on the ATR-80, and although many may think this is a backward step with the possibility of capstanless drive, there are few major problems with conventional capstans and pinchwheels as long as the wow and flutter is low.

The Tascam spec, for W+F on this machine is 0.06 per cent DIN pk, wtd, at 15ips, which is extraordinarily lax, and would certainly be appalling if it were the actual figure, but I am happy to say that measurement indicated figures of 0.028 per cent at 15ips, and 0.012 per cent at 30ips, which is more acceptable.

I can only assume that Tascam are following the age-old Japanese tradition of under specifying things in the manual so that all real machines are well within spec! Speed change (from 15 to 30ips) proved very fast and easy, without stopping the tape in between speeds, and there are switches inside to change the speeds from 15/30 to 7½/15 if necessary.

SPOT ERASE

This is one of the ATR-80's quirky features, because it doesn't do what you'd expect of spot erase. Instead of turning on the erase current and leaving you to move the tape manually across the heads, it turns on the erase current and asks you to press the play button, at which point it moves the tape itself at slow speed (1⅞ips) until you tell it to stop. You can vary this speed with a switch inside to either half or twice the standard amount, but I can imagine that this might not be too popular with the average engineer, given that spot erasing is a rather hit and miss affair in the first place.

TRANSPORT FEATURES

'Dump' and 'cueing' controls are provided, with DUMP sending tape off the right hand end of the deck at reasonably slow speed, and CUEING dropping the tape fibers in fast wind so that you can hear what's going past. The cueing operates in conjunction with a master attenuation switch on the audio side which allows you to institute a drop in gain when you put the tape on the heads while winding, to avoid blowing your ears out.

There's also a SHUTTLE wheel which is sprung to return to the centre, and a speed reference switch to select varispeed, fixed or external control.

VARISPEED

Although not a major criticism, it is annoying not to be able to varispeed the machine from its own front panel, although the varispeed mode is selected here. A +/— 20 per cent range is available from the remote unit using up/down buttons (which, as you know, I can't stand!), although you can't select the varispeed mode from the remote.

Nevertheless, it doesn't seem that there is any disadvantage in leaving the machine in varispeed mode set to 0 per cent when using the remote, because the wow and flutter is no worse (it can be on some machines). A 0 per cent varispeed can be quickly set from the remote by pressing both the up and down button together, but you'd have to be careful to make sure that you didn't leave it set to something other than zero, especially when it's possible to turn off the varispeed display.

RECORD CONTROL

All record mode selection is made on the remote, and this again is relatively conventional, having a row of 24 buttons for READY, SAFE, INPUT, SYNC, and REPRO modes. Tracks put into READY having flashing red LEDs which stop flashing when the track goes into record, although there is no indication at all on the machine as to which tracks are in record or ready. Tracks can be dropped out, once in record, by pressing SAFE on individual tracks or by pressing PLAY for all tracks; dropping in from PLAY is a one-button operation.

Like every manufacturer before them, Tascam claim to have ultra-quiet gapless punch-in and out, as if it had not yet been achieved and they are the first people to think of it. This machine makes sure the timing of erase and bias is correct at all varispeed, and because microprocessor control is used to time the ramps, any variations in timing due to RC circuit tolerances is eliminated.

CONVENTIONAL AUDIO

On the audio side, you'll still need your screwdriver with this Tascam, with everything except two master bias presets being conventional in its means of alignment. Audio electronics for each channel are all mounted on one fairly compact card, and these are easily accessed from behind the front doors, having fairly closely mounted alignment pots with rather small writing next to them. These I found a little confusing because of the difficulty in determining what I was aligning, but I am sure one would get used to this with familiarity.

A master audio card provides several switches for changing overall audio specifications, such as magnetic reference level (250 or 320 nW/m), IEC/NAB equalisation, output level for 0VU (+4 or +10dBm), balanced or unbalanced outputs, and cue attenuation.

These switches set DC control lines to all the audio cards, which in turn set the relevant circuit in or out. As I said before, you can also set two master bias levels for two different tape types, which may be quickly interchanged. This card sports a 3.5mm unbalanced jack input called TEST into which one can feed an external oscillator to be distributed to all tracks at the same time. This is a useful feature which saves having to patch an oscillator (other than the desk's) into each track separately when doing any servicing. Coupled with this, there's a TEST OUT jack on each channel to the same standard as the input.

Although I have said that the audio side is fairly conventional, there are one or two points which deserve mention. First, the meters used, although VUs, have peak LEDs associated, which can be set to come on at a variety of audio levels (set by a pot on the audio card — normally +12dB ref. 0VU).

These might not have a great deal of use, especially when one normally uses the desk's meters to monitor peak levels and would rarely be looking at the tape machine, but might still appeal to some engineers. Second, any channel may be chosen to be a timecode channel simply by flicking a DIP switch on the channel card.

This sets up the response of the channel for optimum recording and reproduction of the timecode waveform, and a little light comes on on the card concerned labelled (strangely) SYNC LOCK to denote this channel. And finally, that phase compensation adjustments are provided on each channel for both low and high speeds separately, which can be used for tweaking to get the best waveform linearity between input and off-tape signal.

AUDIO PERFORMANCE

Most multitrack machines employ some form of out-of-phase cross feed between adjacent tracks' record and sync amps in order to reduce record/sync crosstalk. That is the bleed-through from one track which is recording to the track next to it which is in sync reproduce. That is because the head acts very much like a transformer, and without any compensation this crosstalk can be awful.

In the ATR-80, Tascam have opted not to use electronic means for this cancellation, but to incorporate it into the head design, which, as I have said, used thin laminated layers between the tracks to act as a magnetic shield. Considering that this is all that is used, the crosstalk is not bad at all, but it is not quite up to the standard of one or two of the machine's competitors in this respect, measuring -24db at 1kHz, -3dB at 10kHz, and 0dB at 16kHz. It didn't drop any further below 1kHz.

This is always a bad result on any machine, and I can imagine that if electronic means and the magnetic means employed were used together, some world-beating results might be obtained.

Because of the use of the same head gap for record and replay heads, the synch replay response was excellent, only 1dB down at 16kHz, which sets this machine apart from the rest in this respect.

This is a feature which has been part of the Tascam claim-to-fame on its semi-pro machines in the past. A separate EQ pot is provided for SYNC REPRO HF, although the same amplifier is used as for replay with a relay changing over the EQ and things. I assume that the separate sync EQ is in case the sync head is at a different stage of wear to the repro head, because in all other respects the two heads are interchangeable.

Square wave response was very good, especially when using the phase compensation control to tart it up a bit, and this was maintained up to quite a high frequency.

REMOTE CONTROL

There's nothing really unusual here, except the need to get used to one or two modes of operation. INPUT/SYNC/REPRO buttons for each channel's monitor mode have LEDs which should display the mode active at the time, but when in sync the lights do not change to INPUT when that particular tracks goes individually into record, or into STOP, although the monitoring does switch to that mode.

Tascam acknowledge this problem and hope to do something about it. Neither does the monitoring switch automatically to INPUT from SYNC when the machine is stopped unless INPUT ENABLE mode is selected. But this mode only works for all channels together (there are ALL SYNC, ALL INPUT and ALL REPRO modes).

A useful control allows ALL SAFE to be temporarily entered from REC STANDBY, and this is good because when returning to STANDBY the tracks previously put into READY go back into ready mode. There's also a control labelled RHSL (rehearsal) which can be held down to imitate a drop-in (switching the monitoring over from SYNC to INPUT), with a buzzer which squeaks when it's operated, but this doesn't programme automatic record drop-in once the rehearsal is perfected, which would have been sensible. Neither does it use the RECORD button to initiate the rehearsal, which would also be much better when this is the button to be used for the real drop-in.

The remote doesn't include an autolocator; this is an option, as is the stand on which they all mount, but the AQ-80 autolocator can be added to the top of the remote unit, making quite a neat, if large contraption. While mentioning the autolocator, I would point out that it too is fairly conventional, except for the PRE-ROLL which can be programmed so that the machine parks several seconds (up to 12) before the memory location.

CONCLUSION

The ATR-80 makes a good entry by Tascam into the highly competitive field of professional audio, but they are no strangers to competition with their other products. Clearly there are one or two ergonomic points which should be cleared up, but these can only result from several years experience in selling such machines, and are not serious in this case.

The proposed price for the ATR-80 is around £28,000, which includes a remote, but no stand and no autolocator. This makes it reasonably competitive, and I think that it will prove an appealing machine, but there will be strong competition from Otari with the MX-80, which has a much lower price and good specification, having HX-Pro as standard.

A 32-track, two-inch version of the ATR-80 is proposed, which makes it a completely different proposition, and there is space to upgrade a 24-track machine to 32 in the future. This might well prove a popular point in its favour, depending on whether the demand for lots of track is going to return at some time.