I’m a big fan of the Roland VS digital multi-track recorders from the early 2000s. I used to have a Roland VS840 8-track recorder, with which I recorded some guitar and vocal songs back in around 2006. I’ve been looking at picking up another VS recorder lately, probably the 1680, 1880 or 2480. The 2480 was really cool, with VGA out and mouse control. The Roland VM7200 Video Mixer came from that era as well and shares some of the architecture.

Yamaha had a smaller competing series of digital multi-track recorders around that time. The AW4416 being the last one made, and the AW1600 before that. I know little about their usage but I am a big fan of the Yamaha O2R and DM1000/2000 digital mixers from that time period.

This era of digital recording tech really deserves a blog post or YouTube video going into the history and development. Perhaps this is a long shot but I’d love to hear from anyone that may have worked on those series of hardware products, about the dev process and the technologies involved in creating the hardware and software.