Remember when you absolutely NEEDED a mixer? And a dozen compressors and FX units, and a mile of cable, just to make a basic mix of a track? That sort of kit still serves a valuable purpose, and most better studios still keep it all in play, but plenty of folks these days get by fine with just a few pieces of ‘outboard’ gear and a good DAW. All those big ole mixers that we used in the 80s and 90s though? And I am not talking about Neves and Tridents, or anything with ‘cult’ value…. all those big, garden-variety consoles are still out there, waiting in the basements and attics and backrooms of this great country, too boring to use, too… well, too ‘this thing cost a fortune new!’ to scrap. Above: The AUDY Model 2000 circa 1981. Below: the Walker AV 40 series, The Tascam Model 15, The Tapco Series 72 and 74, the StudioMixer c. 1981, The StudioMaster 16-4-2, Soundcraft series 800, The NEI 164XM, The Canary 16:6 and 24/4 circa 1981, the BiAmp 83, The AudioArts 8000 and 4000, the Allen and Heath 16:4:2. If yr using any of these, if you can advocate for em… drop us a line and weigh in… plenty of this stuff on the Craigslists of America… let’s find out which are worth saving!
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I had one of those Tapco 16 channel mixers about 8 or 9 years ago. I loved it. Thing was beat to hell and still worked great. Not very "transparent" I would say, kinda made everything you ran through it a bit dull and noisey, like it was coming off of shitty old tape or something. At that time I was doing mostly all electronic music, so it worked out well for making things a little less computer-y sounding, and sterile. It had a built in spring reverb mounted on the back, and that's something I would really like to see come back in style with mixers. Just turn the knob on any channel and you got verb.
I have a modded and perfectly running allen and heath series 8 16 track running with a soundcraft 760 2" 24 track, with Logic pulling it all together!
Best part is I paid $300 for the mixer, $300 for the tape machine
All local
Hi Friends,
Does anyone have the Service Manual or Schematics of the Tapco 7416 Mixer, 74 channel 16 series ?
Thanks
Sergio
contact: servox@live.com
Soundcraft 800 user here! We got ours for free from a friend of ours who was mixing tape recordings with it in his studio, but threw it to the curb when he stopped recording to tape and upgraded his rack with 8 Neve preamps. Our board is from early 1982, and was working overall but in serious need of some TLC. It's a 18/8/4 configuration and was apparently originally owned by a touring rock band. There was a $500 price sticker on it and the console was probably one of the dirtier bits of gear I've seen. Spent a long time removing decades of masking tape residue from the channel inputs, a thick layer of cigarette smoke residue probably from many nights of a FOH engineer enjoying cigarettes over it. Still working through the electrical issues but 14 of the channels work enough to use and we have started using it as a front end to our recording interface which has very clean and characterless preamps.
Overall, really nice sounding board! The Preamps sound nice and running an entire band through them sounds really great, with everything having that nice warm, glued together console sound. The EQ is great too, nice and simple and shapes the sound just enough going into the DAW without coloring things to drastically. Will experiment with more of the routing options as we restore it more and more, we're now going to take out the individual channel strips and work through them one by one, and will probably recap it soon.
It's been a fun journey restoring it and I can't wait to work on it some more. Big fan of Creation records and My Bloody Valentine and those records were mostly produced on budget DDA and Soundcraft boards so it's a nice fit for our studio sonically. Another studio we are a fan of in Appleton, WI, Crutch of Memory, uses a Soundcraft 400 and produces fantastic records with it. Great stuff and under rated boards, nice seeing these original brochures!