Fostex MCI-24
A badge that shows up in studio gear lists and used-equipment classifieds, and almost nowhere else.
Overview
The Fostex MCI-24 is a designation that turns up in period studio documentation and never resolves into one clean product. What is documented is that "MCI 24-track" appears again and again in early-1980s recording-industry trade coverage as a workhorse multitrack, and that Fostex's name gets tangled up with it in the used market. Mix (July 1984, p.58) reported a wave of Texas studios standardizing on the format. Huddleston's Recording Studio in Garland added a Trident console and an MCI 24-track. Eagle Audio in Fort Worth opened with an automated MCI Series 600 console and an MCI 24-track. Austin's Rollingwood Recording upgraded to an MCI 16-track. That pairing, MCI transport and Fostex timecode gear, is the closest thing to a documented Fostex/MCI relationship in the available sources. It is a synchronizer match, not evidence that Fostex built the machine.
By the early 1990s the MCI 24-track had gone from prestige item to clearance stock. Studio Sound (May 1991, p.22) listed one through a UK used-gear dealer as "a large, early 2" recorder looking for a good home," priced to clear at £1,995. That is the kind of language a broker uses when a machine is heavy, old, and no longer fashionable. The same listing page carried a Fostex 1920 MAT and an Akai 24-track system bundled with a Fostex 4030. Fostex's role in this era was often the sync and support electronics around somebody else's tape transport.
Collectors chasing a "Fostex MCI-24" should be suspicious of the name. The documented products are an MCI 24-track recorder and separate Fostex synchronizer hardware. Whether a factory-badged Fostex MCI-24 ever existed as a single unit is not established by the sources available here. Anyone who has put hands on one, or has a service manual with the Fostex name on the cover, would help the archive by documenting it.
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