Fostex G-16S
A half-inch sixteen-track that Fostex built to be chased, synced, and rented by the month.
Overview
The G-16S is a half-inch, sixteen-track analog multitrack recorder - the Dolby S-equipped revision of the G-16 that Fostex put into the field at the start of the 1990s. The archive's fact sheet for this model came back empty, so almost everything below comes from period advertising and trade-press coverage, not a factory spec sheet. That coverage shows a machine aimed at the project studio that needed to lock picture, MIDI, and tape together without buying a two-inch.
The clearest description of the feature set is in DB Magazine (July 1991, p.65), which listed the G16S next to its bigger sibling, the one-inch twenty-four-track G24S. Per that item, both decks carried Dolby S noise reduction, auto locate, auto play, auto return, zone limiting, ten memory locations for cue points, and a detachable control panel that doubled as a full-feature remote. Those are the details that separate the S from the plain G-16. The transport automation and the removable remote are the day-to-day conveniences. Dolby S is the big one for anyone printing to tape, since it was the last and most aggressive of the Dolby consumer-derived noise reduction systems and the reason a half-inch sixteen could hold its own against hiss.
The G-16S also turns up repeatedly in lease advertising of the period. A recurring trade-press campaign offered a G16S paired with a Fostex 820 20x8 board for $242 a month on a 60-month lease. The fine print noted packages between $5,000 and $75,000, credit approval required, and a two-year minimum in business. The same ad block quoted a G24S with Dolby S and a Soundcraft Delta 8 against an Akai ADAM 12-track digital rig and a Lexicon 300. The G-16S was not the flagship, but it was the affordable analog half-inch option in a rental sheet that also listed digital.
The G-16, the model this one revises, was reviewed in Mix (January 1991, p.84) by Larry Oppenheimer. His first experience with Fostex gear, an early four-track cassette machine, had left him unimpressed, and he came to the half-inch sixteen-track expecting more of the same. He wasn't disappointed with what he found, calling it one of the more fulfilling products he'd worked with. The review ran across several pages, with later installments (p.88, p.90) getting into the machine's function-assignment behavior and its jog wheel. His complaint about the jog wheel was that he wished it could be operated from controller messages.
Sync was clearly the point. Mix (June 1992, p.82) ran a piece by George Petersen on MIDI Machine Control with the G-16S and C-Lab Notator 3.1. It noted that tape-to-MIDI sync was nothing new, but that MMC capability plus the optional 8330 synchronizer let G Series decks chase-lock to any time code source - and that the 8330's approach to the G-24S was identical. The same piece noted Notator 3.1 also supported MMC control of the Fostex R-8 and a number of Tascam models. The G-16S was designed to be the tape deck at the center of a MIDI-and-video workflow, not a standalone recorder.
One more item is easy to misread. A Fostex trade item described the company introducing the X-18 Multitracker and offering MIDI studio control packages built around the R8 eight-channel multitrack, the MTC-1 interface, and either an 812 or 454 mixer. It also noted that standard software programs, C-Lab Notator and Steinberg/Jones Cubase, had been pre-configured to drive the Fostex R8, G16S, and G24S for transport functions like play, record, rewind, and fast forward. That names the G-16S as a supported target of the era's two dominant sequencers.
The G-16S is a Dolby S half-inch sixteen with real transport automation and a detachable remote, built to lock to time code and to be driven by Notator or Cubase, and sold in the early '90s as much through lease packages as through dealers. Beyond that, the documentation runs thin.
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