Digital Recorders

Have Roland finally outgunned Akai's renowned MPC series in the battle for the hip-hop market?

Some users of the Roland VS2480 discovered that their unit's inputs suffered from significant harmonic distortion for signals above -6dBFS...

Roland's eagerly awaited new flagship VS workstation builds on the success of the VS1680 and VS1880, offering a massive range of features including 24-track, 24-bit and 96kHz recording, a 64-channel digital mixer, up to eight stereo effects processors, 24-voice phrase sampling, and an enhanced graphical output for a VGA monitor.

Hot on the heels of Fostex's DMT8 Roland's new VS880 offers another take on the affordable digital multitracker concept. But as Paul White discovers, beneath the apparent similarities lie significant differences...