The Roland Vs890 was the last of the Roland Vs880 recorder upgrades before they went on to the vs1680,1880 ,2000,2400 series. It looks like an orginal vs880 and is an 8 track digital recorder like the original vs880. However, it is much improved version for several reasons:it has a black casing rather than gray, it has 24 bit a/d and d/a converters (as opposed to 20 bit vs880's), it has spdif and optical i/o and has 2 f/x cards built in, it has an 8 track digital mixer, records at 44.1k or 48k uncompressed (which was not possible on the original vs880), it also has mastering and automation, oh, and it records 8 tracks at once!!! and full midi automation as well. I recently got a second one of these to make sixteen tracks of vs890. For me this is ideal, because quality wise the vs890 is beyond reproach and is the biggest secret bargain in recording today!! It's sound quality is as good if not better than any digital recorder including pro tools setups or other computer based daw's. Granted I still edit and master on a PC ,but to track I use these and they work great. I originally paid $2400.00 for a vs-880 when they first came out, I picked up a vs-890 for $199.00 used!!! Seems crazy really, as it is not obsolete by any means, there are newer recorders with more tracks and built in drum machines and so on, but the f/x on the vs890 are usually of higher quality and the sound quality of the vs890 is excellent and usually sounds better than many newer units!! record at 24bit 48k is more than one needs to produce great recordings, I suppose you could pay the extra $1000 to go to a 24bit 96k recording setup,but can you hear a difference between 48k and 96k? or 192k? doubt it, I in fact use 24bit 44.1k to avoid dithering down to 44.1k later to burn to CD. I any case, these are biggest bargains around ,not to mention the 8 track digital mixer with full automation. ALso, from my experience, The vs is really steady, it never crashes like a PC daw, it never locks up and there is zero latency like many PC based daw's. For me its perfect as I hardly use more than 8 tracks to record live and they can be linked together. I have 2 8tr vs890's as well as 2 vs880xpanded machines for a total of 32 tracks. Also, I move the final recording via digital spdif into my pc for further editing and mastering. Sadly, Roland kind of went crazy and discontinued the vs890 and the new vs24track is really expensive, the 8track VS went to to Boss, a division of Roland and they have a unit similar to the VS, but cheaply made and not as good in my opinion and it will set you back about $1000 or so. If you really need tons of tracks then a pc based daw might be the way to go, but I have used these Rolands for almost 20 years now and still have not found a recorder that sounds better (unless it cost an obscene amount of money (several thousands of dollars and even then I am not sure it would sound much better at all as it is digital...). I highly recommend the roland vs, even the original vs880 is a great sounding recorder. In fact, other than more tracks, the additional bells and whistles to new machines to charge thousands of dollars like f/x plugin's which is covered by my PC and DAW like editing which I do on pc as well. Were talking about just hard disc recording, the Roland vs 890 is hard to beat and at under $200.00 it cant be beat !! Ok, the vs890 doesnt have great mic pre's or lots of inputs which is where the mackie 32x8x2 mixing console come in as a front end, it really is a great combination . I have an emu and cakewalk sonar computer daw setup as well, but I prefer recording with the mackie console as a front end to the roland vs machines. I just prefer the ease of use and recording quality!!
Well, today in my studio I got a laptop hooked up to my home PC network (just a pc and laptop hooked up to router) and I got an external usb drive shared between the pc and the laptop. the pc is my music studio PC. More on this later.....!!
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