OT: Roland VS880

Hi all, Just wondered if anyone had experience of the Roland VS880 digital multi-track recorder? Im wanting a digital recorder, preferably 2nd (to get an older, but higher specced unit), and i can afford to spend more than around £200.

Ive spotted a VS880 EX going for this. It looks a decent unit. The only downfall being it seems to only support upto a 4GB hard disk.

Anyone have any other suggestions of digital recorders to look at?

The Roland VS series are far superior to any of the other manufacturers,in my opinion.The main drawback with the 880/890 series is the lack of available info on the screen.The 1680(which I have owned for 3+years)and 1880 and 2480 really score in this respect. 4 gb can actually hold a vast amount of info.I have 2.1 gb and had about 4 hrs of my band at 44.1k on 4 tracks ,then added bass and percussion,optimised the drive and still had 400 minutes left! Check out VSplanet,a bulletin board for owners of VS machines.

I've used one for several years - the EX is essential for compression/reverb in mastering afterrecording.

most of the tracks on http://www.mp3.com/davidkilpatrick are VS880EX, mainly with a Yamaha 12/4 desk feeding four channels separately, and a little use of multitracking and editing - though what I do tends to be natural acoustic, just overdubbing mandolin, zouk, bodhran or second guitar part over 1st guitar part.

It is a very clean system, 4Gb replacement disks are hard to get, but you can plug in an external SCSI and use that instead - any size seems to be OK if you partition it into 4Gb partitions (you can apparently do the same with a larger internal IDE disk, but you have to prepare it off the machine, and I can't get anything to work that way).

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I believe others have done this successfully - a search for 'hard drive' or similar in the forums at <http://www.vsplanet.com> will probably show you how - or post the question there. The other point to bear in mind is you can actually record quite a lot on a 4Gb disk - and you should be backing up anyway, in case of disk failure.

I've been using the original VS880 for a few years with few problems even with my 2.1 Gb drive - I don't have experience of other machines

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Thanks for the reply. Its my first multi-track of any sort, so i know nothing about bouncing etc.... The unit looks fairly simple (ish).

Ill post back when i make a decision (think im gonna get it - i could always sell it on