Tagged As: Fostex Xr 7
Question:
Both seem like decent 4-tracks. I was wondering what people thought of either one of these models. And compare them, and if you can, go into details of what features are useful and useless:
Answer:
Wouldn't you know it, months after I bought my XR-7, tascam comes out with the 424 MKII! At the time the Fostex blew out anything tascam had for the same price, but looks like the MKII is right on its heels now. I don't know much about the MKII, but I know all there is about an XR-7. For one the fact that there are no XLR inputs is a pain. The 1/4 inch jacks are weak (plastic, seems like) and with the transformer on the end of the cable, it wobbles out of the jack easily. Not good. I also have a problem recording my ungrounded acoustic guitar (this could be fixed if I had the $$$ to fix the guitar, you know) it will buzz unless I take off my shoe and ground myself to the punch/pedal (I discovered this solution by accident!). I think the MKII has sweepable mids on all channels, correct? The XR-7 only has it on 5 and 6, (what they consider their primary recording channels...I thought this was a four track, not two...). Anyway, from my experience the sweepable mids really don't help much for my applications, mostly acoustic guitars. If you're really going to mess with mids properly you need an outboard eq, the ones in 4 tracks sweep too wide to do any good, IMO. What you gain you lose somewhere else. The XR-7 does sound great though, a lot better than an old 4 track a friend of mine had that was built five years ago. I don't even mess with the eq at all, just plug in and play, and it comes out great. Check to see if the XLR inputs on the MKII have trim controls for them, that would be really useful. The XR-7 bounces come out pretty good the first time but after that start to deteriorate, and punches come in smooth with no pops. Let's see...oh, the XR-7 does have a normal speed setting so you can play regular tapes in it, but I found that speed to be a little slower than standard. May just be my machine, but check it out if you can. Since the speed on mine is subpar, its rendered itself useless. The foldback feature, once I figured it out is really nice too, but I'm sure the MKII has somekind of monitor feature on it, as well, but maybe not as simple, (could be simpler, I don't know...). I guess one last difference would be that the Fostex uses dolby C Noise Reduction while the Tascam uses DBX. I heard from a recording engineer here to stay away from DBX, he said he didn't like the way it compressed the sound of drums. He's got a real sensitive ear, maybe that's something you may or may not notice.
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